CHI99LA157 · Robinson R22 BETA
Robinson R22 BETA · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From 57C to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99LA157
- 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 R22 BETA
- 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
- N215WW
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 57CTo 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
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Planned approach, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was practicing a pinnacle approach to a specific point in a fallow farm field. The pilot stated that he began a descent towards the landing point and at an altitude of approximately 10 feet agl he began his final vertical descent. The pilot reported that the helicopter began to, '...shudder violently,' and he made the determination that the shuddering was a result from settling with power. The pilot stated that he tried to maneuver the helicopter out of the rotor-blade turbulence by moving the cyclic forward but the helicopter began to descend at an increasing rate. The pilot reported that he was too low to lower collective and he tried to arrest the descent by increasing the helicopter's pitch. The helicopter impacted the ground on the skids and rolled over on the windscreen. The retreating main rotor blade struck the tail-boom, separating it from the helicopter.
Probable cause
The pilot's improper approach to landing A factor associated with the accident was the pilot's inadvertent settling with power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99LA157
- Event ID
- 20001212X18726
- Case number
- CHI99LA157
- 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: c59a0517b92d2f22b78c50fb3fd349f42399dfcc82502727657d6e6f58aeb8ae; retrieved 2026-09-22T15:10:58.099Z.