NYC96GA083 · Bell 206L-1
Bell 206L-1 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From Yeager Airport (CRW) to State Police Heliport (WV07)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC96GA083
- 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
- 2 · 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
Bell 206L-1
- Aircraft type
- Bell 206
- 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
- N79SP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Yeager Airport (CRW), WVTo State Police Heliport (WV07), S. CHARLESTON, WV
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Airframe, component or system failure
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Manufacturer › Maintenance, service bulletin/letter, inadequate
- Miscellaneous rotorcraft, tail boom › Fatigue
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Three minutes after takeoff, an ATC controller heard a garbled transmission with an ELT signal in the background. Witnesses observed the helicopter in level flight, about 300 feet above a hill, when a tail section separated from the helicopter, followed by the helicopter entering a spin, rolling inverted, and descending into trees. The tail boom section aft of boom station 167, which included the upper and lower vertical fin, the tail rotor gear box, and the tail rotor hub and blades, was found 650 feet from the main wreckage. Examination revealed fatigue cracks at the separated area of the tail section. Due to reports of tail boom cracking, an Alert Service Bulletin had been published by the manufacturer in 1987 recommending an inspection of the tail boom every 100 hours, which had been complied with by the operator. The manufacturer and the FAA certification office were aware of a few reports of tail boom cracking, and were not aware of over 220 Service Difficulty Reports that concerned cracks in the Bell 206L tail booms. A doubler was added to the failed area on recent production models; however, no modifications were developed to add a doubler to the failed area of the older models.
Probable cause
the helicopter manufacturer's inadequate maintenance service bulletin inspection interval which failed to provide timely detection of preexisting fatigue cracks in the tail boom. Factors were: the manufacturer's failure to develop a modification of the failed area, and the failure of the FAA certification office to monitor and act upon the significant number of reports of tail boom cracking that were reported by industry.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC96GA083
- Event ID
- 20001208X05655
- Case number
- NYC96GA083
- 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: 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: 6704fda7341850f9660ba30e28f7706bfe5c73d5c609c5d51659b2957f475f1f; retrieved 2026-09-20T23:23:34.148Z.