FTW96LA125 · Hughes 269A
Hughes 269A · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Addison Airport (ADS) to Addison Airport (ADS)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW96LA125
- 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
Hughes 269A
- Aircraft type
- Hughes 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
- N8897F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Addison Airport (ADS)To Addison Airport (ADS)
- 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 in ground effect
- 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
- Unqualified person › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The owner of a newly purchased helicopter was a student pilot. He decided to make a maintenance run-up and to perform an operational check of the newly installed radios. The student stated that his intentions were to bring the helicopter into a hover, but remain in the same location. After lift-off, the student lost control of the helicopter. Subsequently, it touched down hard, rolled over, and came to rest on its side. According to his logbook, the student pilot/owner of the helicopter had accumulated a total of 88.6 hours in single engine airplanes, of which 0.6 hours were solo. He stated that he had accumulated 2.5 hours in the accident helicopter before the accident.
Probable cause
Failure of the unqualified helicopter pilot to maintain control of the helicopter. Factors relating to the accident were: his lack of total experience in helicopters and his improper decision to attempt to hover without appropriate training/endorsement for flight in the helicopter.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW96LA125
- Event ID
- 20001208X05253
- Case number
- FTW96LA125
- 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 1996-02-17.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 270bbc3ad93ad61ef751c4ea4cb02c070e65a647eedaee5092d5de27d598ce95; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:53:58.809Z.