LAX07CA177 · MD Helicopters 500-E
MD Helicopters 500-E · Accident: hard landing
From FMR · Yerington, NV to FMR · Yerington, NV
Event
- NTSB case
- LAX07CA177
- 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
MD Helicopters 500-E
- Aircraft type
- MD Helicopters 500
- 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
- N526BH
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From FMR · Yerington, NVTo FMR · Yerington, NV
- 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
- Flightcrew › 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 landed hard while practicing a low altitude engine failure and autorotation. According to the CFI, the student had rolled off the throttle to flight idle in preparation for the maneuver. As the helicopter descended the CFI heard the engine spool down, but did not observe a split between the rotor and engine tachometer needles. He realized that the student had not completely bottomed out the collective, and he immediately took over the flight controls. He attempted to regain some of the decayed rotor rpm's by rolling the throttle to full flight rpm, lowering the collective, and raising the nose to build inertia in the blades; however, he realized that the engine did not have enough time to spool up. He then reduced the throttle to flight idle, leveled the skids, and used the pedals to control the yaw in preparation for the touchdown. The helicopter landed hard with forward speed, and came to rest upright. The CFI reported that the maneuver had been initiated at 100 feet agl, with a targeted recovery of 20 feet agl. The CFI said there were no mechanical anomalies noted with the helicopter.
Probable cause
The failure of the student and instructor to maintain an adequate main rotor rpm, and the instructor’s inadequate in-flight supervision while conducting a low-level simulated emergency procedure, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record LAX07CA177
- Event ID
- 20070807X01130
- Case number
- LAX07CA177
- 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: 54e6dbe451754710b7eb3fa82a72bd2a19d215ff1c65fd7cf8adc99ce6650ab4; retrieved 2026-09-21T18:30:26.120Z.