DEN02GA016 · Hughes 369E
Hughes 369E · Accident: in flight collision with object while maneuvering
From Salt Lake City, UT (no airport) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN02GA016
- 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
- 3 · 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
- Government
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Hughes 369E
- 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
- N280SP
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Salt Lake City, UT (no airport)To 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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
- 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 object
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Wire, transmission
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Visual lookout, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The helicopter had been contracted by the State to relocate moose to an area where they would be less hazardous to traffic. After the helicopter herded a moose off a frozen reservoir and back towards the shoreline, the pilot turned and flew into five power lines. The helicopter nosed over, and fell 80 feet in a near-inverted attitude to the surface of the frozen reservoir. It broke through the ice, sank, and then floated back to the surface. A portion of the tail boom remained entangled in the wires. Witnesses said the visibility was 1 mile in fog. An examination of the wreckage revealed no anomalies.
Probable cause
the pilot's inadequate visual lookout, resulting in an inflight collision with powerlines. Contributing factors were the fog and the powerlines.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN02GA016
- Event ID
- 20020103X00007
- Case number
- DEN02GA016
- 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, coordinates. 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: a33ee665c40773c6a07b90e137fe0caf02074b90474d096fcbe9f4e99027a726; retrieved 2026-09-18T14:36:01.519Z.