NYC03LA069 · Bell 47D
Bell 47D · Accident: loss of control on ground/water during takeoff
From Princetown, NY (no airport) to No airport
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC03LA069
- 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
Bell 47D
- 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
- N74120
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Princetown, NY (no airport)To 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
- Takeoff
- 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
- Loss of control on ground/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
- Dual student › Dynamic rollover, not corrected
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, delayed
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instructor had the student conduct approximately 18 takeoff and landings. Each was executed to and from a hover, and the student had difficulty maintaining rotor RPM during the maneuvers. The helicopter then departed, and flew to a private heliport. The student completed an "approach to the ground," and the instructor asked him to practice hover taxiing, before terminating the flight. As the student started to apply collective, the instructor looked inside to check rotor RPM. When he looked back outside, the helicopter was in a nose high, right side low attitude. The instructor lowered the collective and applied full left cyclic, but the roll to the right continued. The main-rotor blades impacted the ground, and the helicopter came to rest. The instructor added that during all the flights and accident sequence, he did not experience any mechanical problems with the helicopter. Examination of the wreckage revealed that the rear of the right skid was in an area of mud.
Probable cause
The student's failure to maintain control while executing a takeoff to a hover, and the flight instructor's delayed remedial action. A factor in the accident was the muddy ground.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC03LA069
- Event ID
- 20030408X00454
- Case number
- NYC03LA069
- 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: 37adf0000aeb95e77d4f25cc7fa127447e48be0845e2b07f89d85dcbc64ba9a9; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:31:27.626Z.