LAX01LA042 · Eurocopter AS 350B-3
Petroleum Helicopters Eurocopter AS 350B-3 · Accident: hard landing
From FFZ to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX01LA042
- 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
Eurocopter AS 350B-3
- Aircraft type
- Eurocopter AS-350
- 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
- N972AE
- Operator
- Petroleum Helicopters
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From FFZTo 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Dual student › Flare, misjudged
- Dual student › Level off, improper
- Dual student › Touchdown, improper
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Mesa, AZ, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
A practice autorotation to touchdown resulted in a hard landing and bent the tail boom of the helicopter at the fuselage attachment juncture. After first demonstrating a practice autorotation to touchdown, the instructor turned control of the helicopter over to the student to perform the next autorotation to landing. The instructor reported that the student's entry was abrupt resulting in first, high rotor rpm, then low rpm; however, the rpm was proper prior to initiating the landing flare. The student's initial pitch application during the flare was a little too high but satisfactory. As the aircraft neared the landing, additional collective was applied, but it was insufficient to check the sink rate and the heels of the skids made ground contact, rocking the helicopter first forward onto the toe of the skid and then back down on the full skid. The pilot heard a metallic sound and, on external inspection, found the tail boom was bent down.
Probable cause
The dual student's misjudged landing flare and level off, which resulted in a heel first touchdown and subsequent hard landing during a practice autorotation. Also causal was the instructor pilot's inadequate supervision of the student.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX01LA042
- Event ID
- 20001212X22306
- Case number
- LAX01LA042
- 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: 526515c2657d7200366bc62ce9627c6fbc12005d7fcc1ab93f83a2022a4cb9b9; retrieved 2026-09-22T12:19:55.930Z.