CHI00LA044 · Hughes 269C
Hughes 269C · Accident: hard landing
From Salina Municipal Airport (SLN) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA044
- 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 269C
- Aircraft type
- Hughes 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
- N58408
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salina Municipal Airport (SLN)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 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
- Hard landing
- 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 › Flare, inadequate
- Pilot in command › Procedures/directives, not followed
- Pilot in command › Throttle/power control, improper use of
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was performing a practice autorotation. He stated that he began the practice autorotation by '...lowering the collective all the way and reducing the throttle setting to a point where the engine RPM and rotor RPM needles split. I verified that the needles split, but something didn't feel normal.' The pilot elected to abandon the maneuver and added power to recover. The pilot stated: 'As best I can remember, the engine and rotor RPM needles had syncronized [sic] and were at approximately the right clock position on the tach face.' The pilot said that at this time he was '...becoming aware of an extremely high descent rate.' The pilot flight manual for the aircraft describes the procedure for practice autorotation as follows: 'Split the needles by lowering the collective while maintaining throttle setting. The throttle correlation will establish a high idle rpm (approximately 2000 rpm) which will aid in preventing the engine from loading up or stalling during recovery. No apparent preexisting anomalies were detected with respect to the aircraft or systems. The pilot listed no mechanical malfunction in his written report.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to follow the published practice autorotation procedures, the improper use of throttle, and the inadequate flare.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA044
- Event ID
- 20001212X20206
- Case number
- CHI00LA044
- 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: e07c707f1c855cc153038933fe05b39e7041ca2f1b6b657b739d4ba7db1868ab; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:45:20.363Z.