DFW05CA070 · Robinson R22
Robinson R22 · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Tulsa International Airport (TUL) to Owasso, OK
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW05CA070
- 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
Robinson R22
- Aircraft type
- Robinson R22
- 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
- N322DA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tulsa International Airport (TUL), Tulsa, OKTo Owasso, OK
- 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 · hover
- 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 in flight
- 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
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Aircraft control, not verified
- 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 1,114-hour flight instructor stated that after completing a practice maneuver, the helicopter was hovering into the wind at a skid height of approximately 5 feet. The flight instructor and the commercial pilot receiving helicopter flight instruction agreed to terminate the training flight and return to a nearby hangar. At this point, the instructor "released his hold on the cyclic control to the student who apparently had not maintained complete control of the cyclic." The pilot stated " the result was that the helicopter pitched down in a nose down attitude." He "attempted to regain control by pulling back on the cyclic and increasing collective pitch, but these actions were all too late, and the front left skid dug into the grass runway, and the helicopter rolled over on its left side."
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to verify that the student had the flight controls and his delayed remedial action.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW05CA070
- Event ID
- 20050301X00245
- Case number
- DFW05CA070
- 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: 7240003de9223ce62cd1cc5d600c4bd9318068fdf1691b1cf434eac70ca61477; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:04:14.020Z.