US Bureau of Land Management Bell 206B accident
Bell 206B · Accident while standing
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's flight rules. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC99TA090
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
- N47122
- Operator
- U.S. Bureau of Land Management
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter Possible conflict
- 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
- Standing · engine(s) start-up
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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 › Aircraft preflight, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Rotor blade tie-down(s), not removed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot for an on-demand helicopter company was beginning a flight that was being operated as a visual flight rules (VFR) U.S. Government flight by the U.S Department of Interior, Bureau of Land Management. The pilot loaded his passengers into the helicopter at a remote biological survey site. He then began an engine start, but a main rotor blade tie-down strap was still attached to one of the rotor blades. As the rotor blades began to turn, the strap struck the upper end of the vertical stabilizer, crushing the leading edge in an aft direction. The helicopter's tail boom was deformed and wrinkled, just forward of the tail rotor gear box.
Probable cause
A failure of the pilot-in-command to perform an adequate preflight inspection, and remove a rotor blade tie-down strap.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC99TA090
- Event ID
- 20001212X19148
- Case number
- ANC99TA090
- 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: 79afeeea5302a4946e6dfd26ca0deec919779e06a435ffb9be969b29cafbda03; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:55:17.962Z.