LAX07CA050 · Robinson R22B
Air Shasta Rotor & Wing Robinson R22B · Accident: hard landing
From Redding Municipal Airport (RDD) to Redding Municipal Airport (RDD)
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX07CA050
- 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 R22B
- 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
- N7198N
- Operator
- Air Shasta Rotor & Wing
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Redding Municipal Airport (RDD), Redding, CATo Redding Municipal Airport (RDD), Redding, CA
- 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
- Landing · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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
- Dual student › Flare, misjudged
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Rotor RPM, not maintained
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Supervision, inadequate
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 touched down hard at the culmination of a practice autorotation. During the instructional flight lesson, the certified flight instructor (CFI) monitored his student's flying. The student had about 15 hours of total helicopter flying experience. The CFI reported that the student initiated the landing flare about 40 feet above ground level (agl). According to the CFI, when the helicopter was about 10 feet agl he took over the controls, raised the collective, and rolled on the throttle to initiate a power recovery. The helicopter's low rotor warning horn sounded and the respective annunciator light illuminated. Thereafter, the helicopter contacted the ground, bounced, and came to rest after making two complete rotations about its vertical axis. The tailboom and vertical stabilizer were bent during the ground impact sequence. No mechanical malfunction or failure was reported to have occurred.
Probable cause
The student's misjudged landing flare, the instructor's inadequate supervision of the flight, and the instructor's failure to maintain adequate rotor rpm.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX07CA050
- Event ID
- 20061206X01746
- Case number
- LAX07CA050
- 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: 9cfa69738414338bbab53cdfae241c28d1403480feb932cd6e4fbda81e950b5b; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:11:44.069Z.