LAX97LA068 · Robinson R22 BETA
Resort Aviation Robinson R22 BETA · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From 1O2 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX97LA068
- 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
Robinson R22 BETA
- Aircraft type
- Robinson R22
- 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
- N8311A
- Operator
- Resort Aviation
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 1O2To 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 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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
- Dual student › Rotorcraft flight controls, abrupt
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, delayed
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the flight instructor (CFI), seconds before the crash, both he and his student were handling the flight controls. The CFI indicated that he had been instructing his student how to hover in ground effect when the student abruptly over controlled. The CFI took the controls from his student a 'little bit too late to correct' the student's control inputs. The main rotor blades struck the ground, and the helicopter rolled over. The CFI further reported that the ground adjacent to the crash site sloped slightly upward, and he had misjudged the location of the horizon. The CFI had been a rotorcraft flight instructor for about 2 weeks.
Probable cause
inadequate supervision by the flight instructor (CFI), and his delayed corrective action to the student pilot's abrupt control inputs, thereby allowing the main rotor blades to strike the ground. Factors relating to the accident were: the CFI's lack of instructing experience and the presence of upsloping terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX97LA068
- Event ID
- 20001208X07189
- Case number
- LAX97LA068
- 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 1996-12-15.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 29d8db5000ab83415eb562878402f2ff705bc4e9d7dc12a931b70b5b3d094191; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:32:19.395Z.