LAX05FA056 · Eurocopter France AS350BA
Eurocopter France AS350BA · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Panamint Spring, CA to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX05FA056
- 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
- 1 · 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
Eurocopter France AS350BA
- Aircraft type
- Eurocopter AS350
- 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
- N410JC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Panamint Spring, CATo 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
- 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 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Clearance, not maintained
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's main rotor blades impacted a mountainside while the pilot's right rear seated cameraman was filming an automobile for a television commercial. During the impact sequence, the tips of the main rotor blades were severed, and then the helicopter crashed onto the underlying state highway. Blade tip fragments were found on the mountainside, about 246 feet from where the main wreckage came to rest against the highway's guardrail. The pilot indicated that while following the film director's requested route he maneuvered at a low altitude over the two-lane highway that was bordered on one side by a drop-off and a rising cliff like face on the other side. While proceeding in an easterly direction, the road curved to the south with the upsloping mountain side located adjacent to the south side of the road. The cameraman's video camera was recovered from the wreckage, and the Safety Board's Vehicle Recorder Division in Washington, D.C. extracted the videotape. The audio and video images clearly showed the helicopter's maneuvering during the seconds leading up to and including the accident, in addition to the pilot's broadcast instructions to the car's driver to proceed "faster if you can." The pilot was flying from the right seat and the helicopter was about 20 feet above the highway.
Probable cause
The pilot's misjudged lateral distance from a mountainside and failure to maintain an adequate clearance from terrain and obstacles while performing a low altitude filming maneuver.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX05FA056
- Event ID
- 20050111X00037
- Case number
- LAX05FA056
- 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: 662773aa7d5dd80f35547c30d843a6d225895106baff8beb05199f2dca64841d; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:09:59.362Z.