NYC01LA204 · Robinson R22
Robinson R22 · Accident: hard landing
From Long Island MacArthur Airport (ISP) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC01LA204
- 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
Robinson R22
- Aircraft type
- Robinson R22
- 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
- N4066G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Long Island MacArthur Airport (ISP), Islip, NYTo 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
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, delayed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The private helicopter pilot under instruction was practicing autorotations. He completed 10 straight-in autorotations, followed by 5, 180-degree autorotations. During the last autorotation, the flight instructor noted that as the helicopter was approaching the ground, its nose was too low, so he took the controls and tried to level it. He was able to bleed off some of the vertical and forward airspeed; however, the left skid touched down and dug into the turf, and the helicopter tumbled forward and came to rest on its side. The pilot receiving instruction had 1,540 helicopter flight hours, with 7 hours in type. The flight instructor stated that although he was on or near the controls at all times, he had been confident in the other pilot's ability "to keep it safe." He also noted that the change of the helicopter’s nose attitude changed rapidly for the worse, and that he had little time to take over and complete a safe landing.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's delayed remedial action during a practice autorotation. Factors included the flight instructor's overconfidence in the pilot receiving instruction, and that pilot's improper recovery from a practice autorotation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC01LA204
- Event ID
- 20010813X01670
- Case number
- NYC01LA204
- 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: 03895e34ee9828adf7148a6d8a097d8cbeec976bd67a9d763339ed12e86b540f; retrieved 2026-09-22T11:41:07.636Z.