ANC97LA115 · Bell 206-LIII
Bell 206-LIII · Accident: roll over during takeoff
From Big Lake Airport (BGQ) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC97LA115
- 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
Bell 206-LIII
- 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
- N94TA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Big Lake Airport (BGQ), Big Lake, AKTo 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Roll over
- 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
- Pilot in command › Dynamic rollover, inadvertent
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Wasilla, AK, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was receiving an evaluation flight from a U.S. Department of Interior, Office of Aircraft Services, helicopter specialist. The intent of the flight was to certify the pilot to fly future government contracted flights. The helicopter pilot performed several maneuvers during the evaluation, and then landed on the shore of a small lake to re-hook an external bucket to the bottom of the helicopter. The terrain was level, but was in an area of soft marshy type tundra. The helicopter was equipped with full length flat skis attached to the bottom of the landing gear skid tubes. These tundra skis help prevent the helicopter skid tubes from sinking into soft terrain. After the external bucket's cable was attached to the helicopter, the pilot began to lift the helicopter into a hover. During the liftoff, the left skid tube remained stuck to the ground. The helicopter then rolled onto its left side and received damage to the fuselage and rotor system.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent dynamic rollover during liftoff. Factors associated with the accident were soft terrain and a snagged landing gear skid.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC97LA115
- Event ID
- 20001208X08526
- Case number
- ANC97LA115
- 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: be5586d909c1601e76b3a26aebaea5f002271c4591a9a5ca3a730db81d75c029; retrieved 2026-09-21T21:17:36.534Z.