ANC04LA079 · Hughes 500D
Prism Helicopters Hughes 500D · Accident while standing
From Iliamna Airport (PAIL) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC04LA079
- 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
Hughes 500D
- Aircraft type
- Hughes 500
- 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
- C-GVHG
- Operator
- Prism Helicopters
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Iliamna Airport (PAIL), Iliamna, AKTo 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 133: Rotorcraft Ext. Load
- 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
- Standing · idling rotors
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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
- Ground personnel › Rotorcraft operations, improper
- Rotor system, main rotor › Foreign object damage
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial helicopter pilot reported the helicopter was sitting and running at flight-idle while he and two helpers prepared a sling load. He said he was climbing into the helicopter, and did not see the activity, but one of the helpers standing near the cargo door threw a rope to the other helper. He said the rope was inadvertently tossed into the main rotor system, and wrapped around the rotor head. The pilot indicated that the main rotor blades and rotor head received structural damage during the encounter with the rope.
Probable cause
The ground crew's failure to use proper procedures while securing a sling load to the helicopter, which resulted in foreign object damage to the helicopter's main rotor system while idling.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC04LA079
- Event ID
- 20040727X01075
- Case number
- ANC04LA079
- 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: 5cc25505a699932f57364d100a4c9e4d3d56225238d2fbec2e1fc678418798c4; retrieved 2026-09-22T07:05:04.558Z.