Petroleum Helicopters Bell 407 accident
Bell 407 · Accident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From EWING BANKS-286, GM (no airport) to 7R1 · VENICE, LA
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97FA352
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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 407
- Aircraft type
- Bell 407
- 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
- N467PH
- Operator
- Petroleum Helicopters
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From EWING BANKS-286, GM (no airport)To 7R1 · VENICE, LA
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Miscellaneous rotorcraft, tail boom › Cut/severed
- Pilot in command › Tail rotor/anti-torque control, not possible
- Rotor system, tail rotor › Blade strike
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The helicopter was in cruise flight over open ocean water at 130 knots and 800 feet MSL, when the pilot felt a "violent jerk or yaw" and heard a grinding sound coming from the rear of the aircraft. The pilot attempted to correct the yaw with the anti-torque pedals, but there was no response, and the aircraft continued to yaw to the right and the nose pitched down. The pilot reduced the throttle and initiated an autorotation. He stated that the helicopter made "almost" a 360-degree right turn before contact with the water at a level pitch attitude with "slight" forward speed. One of the 4 passengers recalled seeing an object fall and hit the water, "leaving a circular motion" on top of the water, just prior to the helicopter landing in the water. The helicopter remained afloat on its deployed skid mounted float system and was recovered on the day of the accident, with the exception of the aft section of the tail boom, including the tail rotor gearbox, vertical fin, and tail rotor hub and blade assembly, which was missing. The aft section of the tail boom was recovered approximately 3 months later. Detailed examination of the tail boom separation area revealed multiple fractures and tears between tail boom stations 148 and 162. Examination of the fractured area revealed no evidence of fatigue. There was evidence of 4 tail rotor blade strikes between tail boom stations 150.9 and 153.2. One of the tail rotor blades was fractured about 14 to 18 inches from the inboard end, with the outboard section missing. The metallic leading edge of the remaining inboard section of this blade was deformed and twisted toward the tail boom. The other tail rotor blade was relatively intact with an indentation near the leading edge on the side toward the tail boom located about 18 inches from the inboard end of the blade. White paint, similar to the paint on the tail boom was found smeared onto the tail rotor blade's black paint in the area of the indentation. Detailed examinations of the tail rotor hub and blade assembly, tail rotor mast, tail rotor controls, tail rotor drive system, and the 90-degree gearbox mounting system did not reveal the reason for the in-flight contact of the tail rotor blades with the tail boom.
Probable cause
The tail rotor blade strike(s) that severed the aft portion of the tailboom, subsequently rendering the pilot with no tail rotor control while in cruise flight. A factor was the lack of suitable terrain for the forced autorotative landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97FA352
- Event ID
- 20001208X08832
- Case number
- FTW97FA352
- 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: 76b68e9f731d457dbe7ff0d22c55e7ec193647fffe79eca31223a779d6891999; retrieved 2026-09-18T17:22:40.479Z.