CEN10CA352 · Aerospatiale AS350 B2
ERA Helicopters Aerospatiale AS350 B2 · Accident: hard landing during autorotation
From Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH) to Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN10CA352
- 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
Aerospatiale AS350 B2
- Aircraft type
- Aerospatiale 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
- N191EH
- Operator
- ERA Helicopters
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH), Lake Charles, LATo Lake Charles Regional Airport (LCH), Lake Charles, LA
- 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
- Autorotation
- 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 › Action/decision
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor was preparing the commercial-rated pilot for a check ride in the helicopter equipped with skid-type landing gear. During one of three running landings to a touchdown, the flight instructor was demonstrating a practice hydraulic failure running landing and the helicopter started to get into ground resonance as he initially touched down. The flight instructor increased power to become briefly airborne and continued the maneuver to a normal practice hydraulic failure running landing. After the ground resonance experience, the flight instructor continued the flight training session for an additional 45 minutes and conducted another hydraulic failure running landing, several slope landings, and five hovering autorotations. Two of the hovering autorotations were described as rough, with an undesired drift to the front left. The flight instructor then left the airport where they had been practicing and returned to their home base airport where they conducted two straight-in autorotations and three 180-degree autorotations, all to a power recovery. After shut-down procedures were completed the two pilots were surprised when they discovered substantial damage, with buckling around the full circumference of the forward part of the tail boom and a crack in the skin at the 6 o’clock position. The flight instructor stated that he thought the damage occurred when they were conducting hovering autorotations. The two pilots reported that they were not injured.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s inadvertent entry into ground resonance when demonstrating a hydraulic failure running landing, which resulted in substantial damage to the helicopter. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's and instructor pilot's failure to control the drift and rate of descent during the practice maneuvers.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN10CA352
- Event ID
- 20100628X53421
- Case number
- CEN10CA352
- 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: 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: 0b81bfaec15629923687a6dc92fc28205439c53665ae4cdc1378f82b7125105e; retrieved 2026-09-15T14:31:41.276Z.