SEA05CA104 · Hiller UH-12E
Whites Flying Service Hiller UH-12E · Accident: roll over while taxiing
From Estacada, OR to Estacada, OR
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA05CA104
- 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
Hiller UH-12E
- Aircraft type
- Hiller UH-12
- 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
- N3030H
- Operator
- Whites Flying Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Estacada, ORTo Estacada, OR
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Taxi · aerial
- 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
- Roll over
- 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 › 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 was parked on a trailer heading into the wind about half an hour prior to its repositioning to a mixing truck. As the pilot lifted the helicopter off the trailer he noticed the wind had switched about 40 to 50 degrees to the left, gusting from 10 to 20 knots. The helicopter subsequently weathervaned to the left, but before the pilot could correct for the left yaw its forward skid became caught under the trailer's left lip, resulting in a dynamic rollover of the helicopter onto its left side. The pilot did not report any anomalies with the helicopter that would have contributed to the accident.
Probable cause
The failure of the pilot to maintain landing skid clearance during hover taxi, which resulted in a dynamic rollover. A factor was the gusty wind condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA05CA104
- Event ID
- 20050615X00778
- Case number
- SEA05CA104
- 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: 7575968451d490727aa092510a3b44ee5828c1feb9bb01588f897d9c07c0d676; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:01:08.779Z.