U.S. Coast Guard Bell 206B accident
Bell 206B · Accident: in flight encounter with weather en route
From TUKLUNG, AK to Dillingham Airport (PADL)
Narrative check · The NTSB narrative appears to contradict this record's operator. Values are shown as recorded, not corrected; compare with the narrative.
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC00TA039
- 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
- Instrument 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
- N5006R
- Operator
- U.S. Coast Guard Possible conflict
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From TUKLUNG, AKTo Dillingham Airport (PADL), Dillingham, AK
- 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
- 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 · cruise
- 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 encounter with weather
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Visual flight rules (VFR) flight into instrument meteorological conditions (IMC)
- 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 › VFR flight into imc, continued
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The airline transport certificated helicopter pilot was transporting a radio technician from a remote radio repeater site as part of a government contract with the U.S. Coast Guard. After departing the repeater site, the pilot was in cruise flight about 500 feet above the ground. The weather conditions were 700 feet overcast, with a visibility of 1 to 2 miles. Snow squalls were moving through the area. The pilot said he was maintaining his visual reference to the ground by using terrain features while flying over a flat, snow-covered delta. Just before the accident, the pilot said he was utilizing a line of shrubs as a point of visual reference, but he could not see any additional visual cues beyond the line of shrubs. He decided to turn around and began a right turn. During the turn, he said he lost all visual references to the ground. He looked at the helicopter's attitude indicator, and noticed he was in a 45 degree right bank, and a 10 degree nose low attitude. He leveled the helicopter and applied collective pitch to begin a climb. The helicopter then collided with the snow. During the collision, the landing gear skids were torn off the fuselage, the main rotor blades separated from the rotor mast, and the tail boom was severed. The helicopter came to rest on its right side. The helicopter was not equipped with a radar altimeter.
Probable cause
The pilot's continued VFR flight into instrument meteorological conditions. Factors in the accident were low ceilings and snow, and snow-covered terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC00TA039
- Event ID
- 20001212X20580
- Case number
- ANC00TA039
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-03-30.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 5b8c26567f7831c7c1252b0965b69411b316dc673be54479faf6e5e29a31086b; retrieved 2026-09-18T16:42:50.084Z.