CHI99LA257 · Schweizer 269C
Schweizer 269C · Accident: loss of engine power en route
From Hays Regional Airport (HYS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI99LA257
- 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
Schweizer 269C
- Aircraft type
- Schweizer 269
- 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
- N88007
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Hays Regional Airport (HYS), HAYES, KSTo 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
- En route · descent
- 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 engine power
- 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 › Procedures/directives, improper
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said he was going to practice an auto rotation. He said he '...rolled the throttle back to idle position and dropped the collective...[and]noted a red light on the dash and could hear the engine had quit running.' He said the subsequent auto rotation '...terminated in a hard landing.' The on-scene investigation revealed flight and powerplant control operational continuity and fuel in the accident helicopter's fuel tanks. The engine was test run and its low idle was 1,300 rpm. According to a representative from a company that maintains and rebuilds helicopters like that of the accident helicopter, '...it is possible for an engine to die when a rapid roll-off of [the] throttle is accomplished and too low an idle RPM setting exists.' The FAA Approved Flight Manual said that the pilot should 'Split the needles by lowering the collective while maintaining throttle setting. The throttle correlation will establish a high idle RPM (approximately 2500 RPM) and will prevent the engine from loading up or stalling on recovery.'
Probable cause
The pilot's use of improper procedures by not following the helicopter manufacturer's recommended engine RPM reduction procedures during autorotations. A factor was the pilot not attaining the proper rotor RPM during the autorotation practice.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI99LA257
- Event ID
- 20001212X19215
- Case number
- CHI99LA257
- 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: 3c81b484e02a230bffc0736a66f97f87b8fc43929b3e850ddc5a74d78bce7d7d; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:22:44.442Z.