ATL00LA063 · Hughes 369A
Hughes 369A · Accident: total loss of engine power (mechanical failure) on approach
From 4A7 to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ATL00LA063
- 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 369A
- Aircraft type
- Hughes 369
- 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
- N330CM
- Operator
- Gregory D. Norred · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 4A7To 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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
- Total loss of engine power (mechanical failure)
- 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
- Combustion assembly › Foreign object damage
- Turbine assembly › Foreign object damage
- Turbine assembly, turbine wheel › Fractured
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Approximately 10 minutes into the demonstration flight, the engine oil temperature increased near red line. The pilot elected to return and land at the departure airport. While enroute to land, the engine lost power, and the pilot initiated an autorotation for an emergency landing. The helicopter collided with the ground between the runway and the parallel taxiway, and rolled over on the right side. During the post-accident engine examination, two unknown pieces of metal were found in the engine assembly. The post-metallurgical examination of the two pieces of metal revealed that the metal was a copper-aluminum alloy. Neither piece was used in the manufacture of the engine or any of its components. The entry origin of the unknown metal material into the engine was not determined.
Probable cause
A total loss of engine power due to foreign object damage to the turbine wheel assembly.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ATL00LA063
- Event ID
- 20001212X21157
- Case number
- ATL00LA063
- 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: 5ddfbfca4b3442b0ff174d38e95f9d10e15630dc883017b4498bf3d08f0309a0; retrieved 2026-09-21T20:12:01.344Z.