Heli USA Aerospatiale AS350BA accident
Aerospatiale AS350BA · Accident: in flight encounter with weather while maneuvering
From Lihue Airport (LIH) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- SEA05MA199
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Instrument Meteorological Cond
Aerospatiale AS350BA
- Aircraft type
- Aerospatiale 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
- N355NT
- Operator
- Heli USA
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lihue Airport (LIH), Lihue, HITo 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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 encounter with weather
- 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 › Aircraft control, not possible
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, performed
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-07/01. ]
On September 23, 2005, about 1415 Hawaiian standard time, an Aerospatiale AS350BA helicopter, N355NT, registered to Jan Leasing, LLC, and operated by Heli-USA Airways, Inc., of Las Vegas, Nevada, encountered adverse weather and crashed into the Pacific Ocean several hundred feet off the coast of Kailiu Point, near Haena, Hawaii, on the island of Kauai. The sightseeing air tour flight was operated under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 135 and visual flight rules with a company flight plan in effect. Localized instrument meteorological conditions prevailed in the vicinity of the accident site. Three passengers were killed, and the commercial pilot and two other passengers received minor injuries. The flight departed from Lihue Airport, Lihue, Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, at 1354 for the intended 45-minute tour.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to continue flight into adverse weather conditions, which resulted in a loss of control due to an encounter with a microburst. Contributing to the accident was inadequate Federal Aviation Administration surveillance of Special Federal Aviation Regulation 71 operating restrictions. Contributing to the loss of life in the accident was the lack of helicopter flotation equipment.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record SEA05MA199
- Event ID
- 20051003X01565
- Case number
- SEA05MA199
- 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 2005-09-24.
- API snapshot SHA-256: bfb5fe06c3d81d76e44df240e7b41e0c89a17523b43f2f21c60cdf3fc6bfd6f2; retrieved 2026-09-18T12:58:12.056Z.