MIA00LA222 · Bell 47G-2A
Bell 47G-2A · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
Event
- NTSB case
- MIA00LA222
- 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
Bell 47G-2A
- Aircraft type
- Bell 47
- 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
- N818HJ
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo 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 · hover
- 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 › Altitude/clearance, not maintained
- Rotor system, tail rotor › Separation
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While at hover, about 15 to 20 feet above a field, at an indicated airspeed of about 20 knots, the pilot heard a 'bang' and the helicopter began to vibrate. The tail of the helicopter started coming around, so the pilot elected to set the helicopter down on the ground. When he landed, the main and tail rotor hit the ground. According to the FAA inspector's report, '...the tailskid may have touched down at a point 123 feet from where the rotorcraft impacted the ground,' at a location in the field where about 20 feet of cotton stalks were found to have been pulled up or cut. The damaged tail rotor and yoke were shipped to Bell Helicopter for metallurgical inspection. The inspection revealed there was no evidence of fatigue cracking on the surface of the separated blade. The separation was an overload failure. The damage to both the separated blade and the complete blade was consistent with a tail rotor blade strike. The pilot reported that he had 15 flight hours in this make and model helicopter.
Probable cause
the pilot allowed the helicopter to get too low while hovering, which resulted in the tail rotor striking the ground, the separation of the blade, and subsequent force landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record MIA00LA222
- Event ID
- 20001212X21550
- Case number
- MIA00LA222
- 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: 19dfb2d2cf52f77e6495a7c407e48951c71c9dc976873088349736da6060057e; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:40:37.918Z.