LAX97LA185 · Bell 206B
Bell 206B · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keāhole (KOA) to Hilo International Airport (ITO)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX97LA185
- 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
- 1 · 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Bell 206B
- 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
- N98AW
- Operator
- Tetsuro E. Sugiyama · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport at Keāhole (KOA), KONA, HITo Hilo International Airport (ITO), HI
- 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
- In flight encounter with weather
- 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
- Pilot in command › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Pilot in command › Flight into known adverse weather, intentional
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The noninstrument-rated pilot filed a company visual flight plan for a ferry flight from Kona to Hilo, Hawaii, but obtained no preflight weather briefing. Meteorological conditions along the intended route of flight were variable from visual to instrument conditions. There was a 7,000 foot overcast overlaying the destination and the eastern portion of the route. A first officer for Hawaiian Airlines stated that he and the captain observed a helicopter 15 to 20 miles west of Hilo on top of an overcast and that the pilot appeared to be searching for a visual path through the clouds. The first officer stated that at that time, there were no holes in the clouds that he could see and that Hilo was under a solid overcast. The aircraft collided with mountainous terrain at 6,500 feet.
Probable cause
the noninstrument-rated pilot flew into instrument conditions and failed to maintain adequate terrain clearance, while attempting to descend through an overcast. The adverse weather conditions and mountainous terrain were related factors.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX97LA185
- Event ID
- 20001208X07954
- Case number
- LAX97LA185
- 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: 5ded89ce5a9dafe710982ed1bf79d1fd837b833e686d41a76fe6de1a5250d133; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:57:41.605Z.