FTW98FA167 · Bell 206B
Bell 206B · Accident: in flight encounter with weather
From Austin Bergstrom International Airport (AUS) to William P. Hobby Airport (HOU)
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98FA167
- 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
- N7734A
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Austin Bergstrom International Airport (AUS), Austin, TXTo William P. Hobby Airport (HOU), Houston, TX
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC); Tree(s)
- 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 › VFR flight into imc, attempted
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The non-instrument rated private helicopter pilot encountered fog and low ceilings while en route on a 132 mile VFR cross country flight. Witnesses near the accident site reported observing the helicopter in a nose down attitude and hearing the sound of impact with trees. Visibility in the vicinity of the accident site was reported by several witnesses to be as low as 100 feet and as high as 1/4 of a mile. The ceiling was obscured due to fog. Residents in the area reported that fog has a tendency to form that time of the year around sunrise. Physical evidence and signatures at the accident site indicate that the helicopter impacted the trees and terrain in a 45 degree nose low attitude in a slight right turn. The accident occurred at 0807 local time and sunrise occurred at 0619. The pilot had accumulated a total of 187 flight hours. No evidence of pre-impact mechanical failure or malfunction was observed at the accident site. No anomalies were found during the investigation that could have prevented normal flight operation.
Probable cause
The pilot's attempted VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions. Contributing factors were fog, low ceilings, and trees.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98FA167
- Event ID
- 20001211X09841
- Case number
- FTW98FA167
- 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: 885df952a8a3728babf023a0ec6966cc76647d83b5798063d22bc9ec831c9600; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:38:27.286Z.