NYC97LA138 · Hughes 269B
Hughes 269B · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From KY29 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC97LA138
- 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 269B
- 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
- N9398F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From KY29To 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
- 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
- Loss of engine power
- 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
- Fuselage, fairing › Separation
- Other maintenance personnel › Maintenance, inspection, inadequate
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Rotor RPM, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor and student pilot had departed from a confined area and were climbing through about 200 feet AGL, at 60 knots, when the engine lost power. The flight instructor took control of the helicopter and performed an autorotation to an open field. Both pilots reported the touchdown was harder than expected during which the right skid collapsed. The flight instructor had performed autorotations to a power recovery, but could not remember the last time he had performed a touchdown autorotation. The manufacturer reported that the blades had flapping damage, and indicated no significant rotation at impact. Examination of the helicopter revealed that the lower fuselage fairing had separated from the fuselage. After separation, the wire inside of the intake hose that supplied air to the fuel control unit pulled out and the intake hose collapsed into the engine air intake, and blocked it. The attachment holes on the lower fuselage fairing were found to be elongated.
Probable cause
The failure of maintenance personnel to identify and correct the worn holes on the lower fuselage fairing and the failure of the flight instructor to maintain main rotor RPM during the autorotative landing. A contributing factor was the flight instructor's lack of recent experience in performing autorotations to a landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC97LA138
- Event ID
- 20001208X08485
- Case number
- NYC97LA138
- 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: 8c8ed39d422f568d88fc0af40600fae67a9806c77ca068eb40f06ca76b85ebef; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:20:31.894Z.