ANC98TA011 · Bell 206B
Bell 206B · Accident: hard landing
From Merrill Field (MRI) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC98TA011
- 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 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
- N83146
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Merrill Field (MRI), 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Rotor RPM, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Two commercial pilots were practicing touchdown autorotation landings at a private snow covered airstrip. The purpose of the flight was for both pilots to maintain their proficiency. The first pilot had performed several straight-in touchdown autorotations. During the last autorotation, the first pilot entered the autorotation at 800 feet above the ground and about 80 knots. During the descent, the pilot maintained a 65 knot airspeed, and began a deceleration flare about 50 to 60 feet above the ground. As the ground speed dissipated, the pilot leveled the helicopter, applied main rotor collective pitch, and touched down with about a 30 foot ground run. As the helicopter slowed to a stop, the pilot indicated the helicopter shuddered several times. The main rotor blades struck the tail boom, severing the horizontal and vertical stabilizer, and the tail rotor assembly, from the tail boom.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain adequate rotor RPM during an autorotation landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC98TA011
- Event ID
- 20001208X09253
- Case number
- ANC98TA011
- 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: 6b8add68a915b313f6195fc3bb6ca223be206830edc4fa5c2e0ac24a5afc3ad7; retrieved 2026-09-22T18:09:50.607Z.