NYC05MA039 · Eurocopter Deutschland EC 135 P2
Life Net Eurocopter Deutschland EC 135 P2 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water en route
From WHC Heliport (DC08) to Stafford Regional Airport (RMN)
Event
- NTSB case
- NYC05MA039
- 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
- 2 · 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 Deutschland EC 135 P2
- Aircraft type
- Eurocopter EC-135
- 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
- N136LN
- Operator
- Life Net
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From WHC Heliport (DC08), Washington, DCTo Stafford Regional Airport (RMN), Stafford, VA
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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 › Descent, continued
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The Safety Board's full brief is available at http://ntsb.gov/Publictn/publictn.htm. The Aviation Accident Brief number is NTSB/AAB-07/04.
On January 10, 2005, about 2311 eastern standard time, a Eurocopter Deutschland GmbH EC-135 P2 helicopter, N136LN, operated by LifeNet, Inc., as Life Evac 2, crashed into the Potomac River during low-altitude cruise flight near Oxon Hill, Maryland. The certificated commercial pilot and the flight paramedic were killed, and the flight nurse received serious injuries. The helicopter was destroyed. The positioning flight was conducted under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 and visual flight rules with a company flight plan filed. Night visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to identify and arrest the helicopter's descent, which resulted in controlled flight into terrain. Contributing to the accident were the dark night conditions, limited outside visual references, and the lack of an operable radar altimeter in the helicopter.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record NYC05MA039
- Event ID
- 20050120X00080
- Case number
- NYC05MA039
- 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: local date, investigation status, coordinates. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2005-01-11.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 2a7bb1f510bcfe28d2f40eb518c7b3c6177426bc5c09d11986034a7c08256662; retrieved 2026-09-20T18:09:18.873Z.