CHI01LA075 · Enstrom 480
Enstrom 480 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water on approach
From Metamora, MI (private airstrip) to Dryden, MI (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI01LA075
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
Enstrom 480
- Aircraft type
- Enstrom 480
- 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
- N704G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Metamora, MI (private airstrip)To Dryden, MI (no airport)
- 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 downwind
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The helicopter was on the downwind leg of an approach to land at the pilot's private heliport. The pilot said, "I took off from my hangar on my farm at about 5:00 pm with 2 friends to just go for a flight local. After flying about 40 minutes in the area of my farm we started back home. The weather was perfect with hardly any wind under 5 knots out of [the] north. I started a southernly downwind to my landing pad. We had just got over a frozen lake in the downwind when without warning or any reason to believe anything was wrong, the helicopter drop[ped] straight down on the lake without me moving any flight controls." A postaccident examination of the helicopter was conducted. The helicopter came to rest about 300 feet from the initial impact point on the frozen lake. No anomalies were found with respect to the airframe that could be associated with a pre-impact condition. No anomalies were found with respect to the engine. The end of civil twilight occured at 1807 and the phase of the moon was a waxing crescent with 1% of the Moon's visible disk illuminated.
Probable cause
The pilots failure to maintain altitude/clearance from the terrain. The dark night was a factor.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI01LA075
- Event ID
- 20010202X00386
- Case number
- CHI01LA075
- 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: c9da42a7326e0f33737045de08a7f2dedb8122b71d30112756787ad57c3bb95e; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:13:57.884Z.