ATL95LA175 · Schweizer 269C
Schweizer 269C · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Birmingham, AL to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL95LA175
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Schweizer 269C
- Aircraft type
- Schweizer 269
- Category
- Helicopter
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N267RW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Birmingham, ALTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Maneuvering · hover
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Loss of control in flight
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Tail rotor effectiveness, not maintained
- Rotor system, tail rotor › Stall
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight departed Birmingham airport with a VFR clearance for a local photo shoot. The helicopter was flying above a ridge line and made a right turn into a hover. At this point it began to rotate to the right about the main rotor shaft, and spiraled to the ground. The pilot stated that there was no mechanical malfunction, and the helicopter had lost tail rotor effectiveness. Examination of the wreckage revealed that the tail rotor drive shaft had broken in overload.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain directional control when he positioned the helicopter in a hover so as to induce a loss of tail rotor effectiveness.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL95LA175
- Event ID
- 20001207X04427
- Case number
- ATL95LA175
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ad9771286b79e0886619355afe4c0012a698f8a2817f056c798b5e7afc4a8431; retrieved 2026-09-21T13:03:37.772Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: departure. The narrative states "The flight departed Birmingham airport with a VFR clearance for a local photo shoot"; the accident site is Hoover, AL.