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CHI08TA014 · Eurocopter AS 350 B2 Ecureuil

9 Oct 2007 · Columbus, OH, United States

Eurocopter AS 350 B2 Ecureuil · Accident: hard landing

From The Ohio State University Airport - Don Scott Field (OSU) to an unrecorded destination

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Event

NTSB case
CHI08TA014
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 AS 350 B2 Ecureuil

Aircraft type
Eurocopter AS-350
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
N71HP
Operator
Unknown
Onboard fatalities
Unknown
Route
From The Ohio State University Airport - Don Scott Field (OSU), Columbus, OHTo 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 · emergency 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

  • Dual student › Descent, excessive
  • Dual student › Run on landing, encountered
  • Pilot in command(cfi) › Remedial action, delayed

Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.

NTSB narrative

The flight was a training flight primarily to conduct autorotations. During one of the practice autorotations, the student developed an excessive sink rate which the flight instructor was slow to catch. The helicopter executed a run-on landing into a field with uneven terrain. Post flight examination the morning after this flight revealed substantial damage to the helicopter. The wind was 280 degrees at 15 knots gusting to 21 knots at the time of the accident. The flight instructor's safety recommendation was to conduct "Autorotational Training to a Runway or improved surface.

Probable cause

The student pilot's excessive descent rate and the flight instructor's delayed remedial action.

Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset

Sources

NTSB record CHI08TA014
Event ID
20071011X01564
Case number
CHI08TA014
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. 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: f84b71ea0b3c947a2d1c0d29ede093193827afa21f94fd776f3403996e815214; retrieved 2026-09-22T03:21:31.513Z.