DFW07LA043 · Eurocopter EC120B
Eurocopter EC120B · Accident: hard landing
From Grand Prairie Municipal Airport (GPM) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW07LA043
- 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
Eurocopter EC120B
- Aircraft type
- Eurocopter EC120
- 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
- N171AE
- Operator
- American Eurocopter
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Grand Prairie Municipal Airport (GPM), Grand Prairie, TXTo 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 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
- 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
- Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
While performing a practice 180-degree autorotation, the 5,943-hour flight instructor observed that the student would not make the landing area. The flight instructor took over the helicopter controls and elected to land in the grass near the runway. The helicopter touched-down hard with low rotor energy and at a higher than normal touchdown speed. The helicopter proceeded to skid on the soft grass before digging in and rolling forward on its nose. The rotor blades subsequently impacted the ground before the helicopter rolled and came to rest on its right side. The pilot did not report any abnormalities with the helicopter's flight controls. The winds at the time of the mishap were reported from 260-degrees at 6 knots. The practice area used for the practice autorotations was aligned on a heading of 170-degrees.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's inadequate remedial action which resulted in a hard landing. A contributing factor was the lack of suitable terrain for the practice autorotation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW07LA043
- Event ID
- 20061226X01846
- Case number
- DFW07LA043
- 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: 0f097b29d80470bd1f0babc404e75caa09675859c4107bb8d2bb50b34552a14d; retrieved 2026-09-22T04:07:15.002Z.