DEN05FA103 · Agusta A119
Agusta A119 · Accident: loss of engine power on approach
From Windy Plains Airport (5CO0) to Mancos, CO
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN05FA103
- 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
- 3 · 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
Agusta A119
- Aircraft type
- Agusta A119
- 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
- N403CF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Windy Plains Airport (5CO0), Durango, COTo Mancos, CO
- 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
- Approach · VFR pattern final
- 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 engine power
- 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 › Autorotation, not possible
- Reason for occurrence undetermined
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The EMS helicopter had been dispatched to medivac a logger who had been injured in a trucking accident. The pilot made a low pass, then circled around to make his landing approach. A volunteer fireman, who was standing at the landing zone (LZ) and directing the helicopter, said the temperature was "about 80 degrees [F.]," and he advised the pilot that the winds were calm. The fireman said the helicopter was about 220 feet above tree level when "it dropped straight down." He heard no unusual engine sounds and did not see the impact. The on-scene examination revealed all four main rotor blades remained attached to the rotor hub and were drooped over the wreckage. Examination of the fuel control unit (FCU) revealed a 1/16-inch gap at the mating flange between the flow (fuel bypass passage, Po) and drive (air pressure passages, Px & Py) bodies. One of four retention-bolts was backed out and the packing was partially extruded. The bolt was too short, another bolt was too long, and the other two bolts were insufficiently torqued. Additionally, the flow and drive bodies were not perfectly flat. Further examination of the FCU revealed no functional anomalies.
Probable cause
a loss of engine power for undetermined reasons and the pilot's inability to get into autorotation prior to impacting the ground. A factor contributing to the accident was the helicopter's low altitude when power was lost.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN05FA103
- Event ID
- 20050719X01059
- Case number
- DEN05FA103
- 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: e31f0c3f5c3e48c8db827005d3998a4961748a12ef4be39f88cd55632d552a22; retrieved 2026-09-20T17:59:50.335Z.