LAX96TA044 · McDonnell Douglas 369D
McDonnell Douglas 369D · Accident: total loss of engine power (non-mechanical) while maneuvering
From Sacramento Mather Airport (MHR) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX96TA044
- 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
McDonnell Douglas 369D
- Aircraft type
- McDonnell Douglas 369
- 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
- N33CN
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sacramento Mather Airport (MHR)To 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
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (non-mechanical)
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Fuel starvation
- 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
- Copilot/second pilot › Checklist, not followed
- Copilot/second pilot › Throttle/power control, inadvertent activation
- Fluid, fuel › Starvation
- Pilot in command › Checklist, not followed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The left seat pilot was practicing night autorotations to runway 22 to maintain his currency. After the left seat pilot completed six hovering autorotations to the ground and eight autorotations to a power recovery, the right seat pilot snapped the right collective throttle to the ground idle position at 250 feet in a climb, to simulate a loss of engine power and announced 'power failure.' The left seat pilot initiated an autorotation; neither pilot was aware of an actual loss of power. When the left seat pilot applied throttle to initiate a power recovery, the engine's compressor stalled and the 'engine out' and 'auto re-ignite' lights illuminated. The left seat pilot continued with the autorotation, landed on runway 22 with the tail-first, broke the skids, and the aircraft rolled over. The investigation revealed that the right seat pilot did not perform the throttle rigging check before departing on the accident flight as recommended by the 369D pilot handbook. Several postaccident ground runs of the engine were conducted. Based upon those, it was determined that rapid roll off of the right seat throttle could retard the throttle below ground idle and flameout the engine. The throttle misrigging had not been detected by maintenance personnel.
Probable cause
Fuel starvation due to the right seat safety pilot's inadvertent engine shutdown when he closed the throttle to simulate an engine failure, and his failure to perform the throttle rigging check before takeoff. Contributing to the accident was the improper rigging of the throttle system coupled with the pilot's improper recovery from the autorotation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX96TA044
- Event ID
- 20001207X04888
- Case number
- LAX96TA044
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 1995-11-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 492f9cacc43bb9f81b910fd23197f8d4b95c8c96df04ba64e5d0cb17c0ba292d; retrieved 2026-09-21T22:00:49.693Z.