LAX93LA323 · Hughes 369D
Butte County Sheriffs'S Dept Hughes 369D · Accident: airframe, component or system failure en route
From O23 to O23
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX93LA323
- 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
Hughes 369D
- Aircraft type
- Hughes 369
- 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
- N8606F
- Operator
- Butte County Sheriffs'S Dept
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From O23To O23
- 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
- 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
- Other crewmember › Security of cargo, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Directional control, not possible
- Rotor system, tail rotor blade › Foreign object damage
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
A sheriff's department rents this particular helicopter on an as needed basis for surveillance and rescue missions. All doors are removed for the missions. The pilot said that he had just achieved a cruise altitude of 500 feet AGL when he heard a loud bang and felt a severe vibration throughout the airframe. The pilot stated that he entered a 180 degree autorotation to a clear area in an almond orchard with power. During the landing flare, the helicopter began to spin to the right when the pilot applied collective. He said that he immediately rolled off the power; the helicopter landed hard and rolled over. A ground witness reported that when the helicopter was nearly overhead he saw a cloth like object come out of the helicopter and fly back toward the tail. The helicopter then descended rapidly as it turned 180 degrees until it disappeared behind the trees. Prior to takeoff, the observer had placed a nomex flight suit under some bags tied down in the rear compartment. Subsequent examination of the helicopter and the accident site revealed that the flight suit was unaccounted for and could not be located. Several days after the accident, a search party located a shredded nomex flight suit in the orchard not far from the accident site and back along the direction of the helicopter's flight path.
Probable cause
the observer's failure to properly secure stowed items in the rear compartment prior to takeoff and the resultant foreign object damage to the tail rotor system which precluded the pilot from maintaining directional control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX93LA323
- Event ID
- 20001211X13175
- Case number
- LAX93LA323
- 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: faaecc5ca7575f3fea034d5f691dea53549829594b30b3452c5e418cbd63848e; retrieved 2026-09-21T22:50:31.206Z.