WPR12TA120 · Eurocopter AS 350 B3
California Highway Patrol Eurocopter AS 350 B3 · Accident: hard landing during autorotation
From Napa, CA to Napa, CA
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR12TA120
- 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 AS 350 B3
- 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
- N341HP
- Operator
- California Highway Patrol
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Napa, CATo Napa, CA
- 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
- 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
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that while hovering about 3 feet above the ground, he performed an autorotation demonstration for the second pilot. Although the flight instructor raised the collective to arrest the descent before landing, the helicopter made a firm landing, which resulted in substantial damage to the tailboom. The flight instructor reported no preimpact mechanical malfunction or failure that would have precluded normal operation.
The Federal Aviation Administration’s helicopter flying handbook identifies the proper techniques for practice autorotation maneuvers from altitude and indicates that one of the common errors that can occur during hovering autorotations is the pilot’s failure to apply up-collective pitch properly, which can result in a hard landing.
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s improper use of the collective control during a practice hovering autorotation, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR12TA120
- Event ID
- 20120302X74637
- Case number
- WPR12TA120
- 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 2012-03-01.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 7696bec41268f7ef36423cc990736e11da386d222deb086f5fc8865bcc57aac0; retrieved 2026-09-15T17:22:08.284Z.