ANC06LA137 · Aerospatiale SA319B
Aerospatiale SA319B · Accident: cargo shift en route
From Port Alsworth Airport (PALJ) to Port Alsworth, AK
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC06LA137
- 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
Aerospatiale SA319B
- Aircraft type
- Aerospatiale SA319
- 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
- N119PH
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Port Alsworth Airport (PALJ), Port Alsworth, AKTo Port Alsworth, AK
- 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 133: Rotorcraft Ext. Load
- 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
- Cargo shift
- 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
- External load sling/harness › Shifted
- Pilot in command › Security of cargo, inadequate
- Rotor drive system, tail rotor drive shaft › Sheared
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a Title 14, CFR Part 133 flight, the commercial certificated pilot was transporting a previously crashed airplane on a 100 foot external load line. The external load line was attached to a spreader bar that was attached to the wing structure of the airplane. While flying about 60 knots, and about 2,000 feet above ground level (agl), the pilot felt the load shift, becoming light, or unloaded, and he began to slow the helicopter's airspeed. The helicopter then suddenly pitched nose-down about 45 degrees. The tail boom of the helicopter was struck by one or more main rotor blades, severing the tail rotor drive shaft. The pilot released the external load from the belly of the helicopter and entered an autorotation. About 1,000 feet agl, the pilot shut the engine off, and performed a touch down autorotation. During the landing on soft tundra, one of the main landing gear wheels dug into the terrain, and the helicopter's tail boom was struck by the main rotor blades, severing about two feet of the aft end of the tail boom. The pilot did not determine the cause of the external load shift.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to adequately secure the external load rigging of an airplane that was suspended from the helicopter, which resulted in a load shift during cruise flight, producing an abrupt nose-down attitude, and the severing of the tailrotor drive shaft by the main rotor blades.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC06LA137
- Event ID
- 20060928X01424
- Case number
- ANC06LA137
- 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 2006-09-24.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 0bb42365d431eff949768ca57754905a1185c61717e7502536b48e915602148f; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:24:14.279Z.