LAX99LA319 · Bell OH58A
R&B Helicopters Bell OH58A · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX99LA319
- 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
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Bell OH58A
- Aircraft type
- Bell OH58
- 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
- N5800K
- Operator
- R&B Helicopters
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salinas Municipal Airport (SNS)To 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 137: Agricultural
- 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 · aerial application
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- 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 › Clearance, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was performing low level aerial application work. Wires ran perpendicular to his flight path at the end of a crop row and a berm was located just in front of the wires. The pilot planned to fly under the wires. As he flew under the wires he heard a loud noise to his rear and the helicopter began to rotate clockwise. He increased pitch on the collective and climbed to approximately 100 feet. He could not control the rotation and completed an autorotation to a hard landing. A ground witness saw the helicopter's tail contact the berm. The tail rotor blades were fractured and separated, and, the tail rotor drive shaft was fractured midway between the aft short shaft and the tail rotor gearbox. The fracture exhibited torsional overload signatures angled aft along a 45-degree plane from the bottom to the top of the shaft. The torsional twist was in a clockwise direction as viewed from the rear. The tail rotor drive shaft normally rotates clockwise as viewed from the rear. No preimpact malfunctions were identified with the tail rotor gearbox or pitch control.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain an adequate clearance from all ground obstacles during a low altitude aerial application flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX99LA319
- Event ID
- 20001212X19815
- Case number
- LAX99LA319
- 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: 38d2464232d312245927c2b17c3b94ddda5f99e043e83185b8b5a24d3dedc72d; retrieved 2026-09-22T14:05:44.861Z.