WPR09TA001 · Eurocopter AS350B3
Eurocopter AS350B3 · Accident: hard landing
From Bellingham International Airport (BLI) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR09TA001
- 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
- Government
- 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 AS350B3
- Aircraft type
- Eurocopter AS350
- 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
- N172AE
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Bellingham International Airport (BLI), Bellingham, WATo 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During an annual helicopter proficiency evaluation flight, the flight instructor told the commercial pilot to conduct manual governor operations and the flight instructor then positioned the governor switch from "auto" to "man" while on the downwind leg to the runway. After performing a left 360-degree turn, the commercial pilot initiated a normal approach to the runway with the intention of performing a run-on landing. The commercial pilot stated that as the helicopter descended through 20 feet above ground level (agl), he attempted to increase throttle and collective to arrest the rate of descent when it "felt like the bottom fell out" and the helicopter landed hard on the asphalt runway surface in a slight nose high attitude. The flight instructor reported that he heard the aural low rotor RPM horn sound and noticed the rotor RPM was slowing through 350 rpm as the helicopter was descending through about 20 feet agl. The instructor stated that before he could react to correct the situation the helicopter struck the ground. Examination of the helicopter by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the tail boom was partially bent and one of the main rotor blades was damaged. No preimpact mechanical anomalies with the helicopter were reported by either pilot.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain main rotor rpm, which resulted in a hard landing. Contributing to the accident were the flight instructor's delayed remedial action and inadequate supervision of the flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR09TA001
- Event ID
- 20081002X13229
- Case number
- WPR09TA001
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2008-10-02.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 00a36ea1586f9d264e23c22a13ae8f390eac7a433b121521193f3949b973eab1; retrieved 2026-09-15T10:16:17.202Z.