LAX98LA311 · Robinson R22B
Robinson R22B · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX98LA311
- 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
Robinson R22B
- Aircraft type
- Robinson R22
- 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
- N8340D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS), CATo 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
- Maneuvering
- 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 control in flight
- 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 › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The chief pilot of the flight school reported that the student helicopter pilot was briefed for his first nonsupervised solo flight. The pilot was instructed to practice traffic patterns and to fly normal approaches and takeoffs, with no emergency maneuvers. The student pilot reported that he practiced traffic patterns, then decided to practice autorotations. He entered the autorotation from approximately 800 feet agl and 70 knots of airspeed. About 200 to 300 feet agl, he initiated a go-around to abort the autorotation. He raised the collective but didn't get a response. He reported that at that point he was 'not sure what was going wrong but felt [he] was losing control and going down very fast.' Once he realized he was about to hit the ground, he raised the collective and applied full aft cyclic. The helicopter impacted the ground and rolled over. The chief pilot reported that when the pilot called him for help after the accident, the pilot stated, 'I did what you told me not to do,' referring to the autorotations. The pilot had been given a solo endorsement on September 14, 1998.
Probable cause
The failure of the student pilot to maintain control of the aircraft while practicing autorotations.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX98LA311
- Event ID
- 20001211X11116
- Case number
- LAX98LA311
- 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: 7d0bdda13b1f693f49c5e620a46bb135cb6d290db328abb5d452326e1259d6ef; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:20:05.645Z.