ERA13LA022 · Hughes/Helicopter Assocs Inc 369A
Hughes/Helicopter Assocs Inc 369A and Hughes 369A · Accident: midair collision while maneuvering
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA13LA022
- 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
Aircraft 1 · Hughes/Helicopter Assocs Inc 369A
- Aircraft type
- Hughes/helicopter Assocs 369
- 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
- N546
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lancaster Airport (LNS), Lancaster, PATo Brandywine Regional Airport (OQN), West Chester, PA
- Aircraft age
- About 15 years (built 1997)
- 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
- Maneuvering · hover
- 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
- Midair collision
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Aircraft 2 · Hughes 369A
- Aircraft type
- Hughes 369
- 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
- N369SN
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Lancaster Airport (LNS), Lancaster, PATo Brandywine Regional Airport (OQN), West Chester, PA
- Aircraft age
- About 44 years (built 1968)
- 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
- Maneuvering · hover
- 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
- Midair collision
- 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 › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The formation flight of helicopters, designated Chalk 1 through 5, was en route to an annual airshow. The lead helicopter (Chalk 1) was on the left base leg of the traffic pattern at the nontower-controlled destination airport when the Chalk 3 helicopter pilot identified and announced that an airplane was on final approach for the landing runway. The Chalk 1 helicopter pilot announced that he was conducting a go-around and turned the helicopter left, inside the landing runway, and proceeded upwind.
About the same time, the flight lead pilot, who was traveling in the trail position (Chalk 5), instructed the other helicopter pilots to "break left or land." The flight lead pilot's ambiguous instruction resulted in the breakdown of the formation flight's integrity. Instead of a flight of five helicopters and one airplane attempting to avoid conflict in the traffic pattern, each of the six individual aircraft were immediately placed in a position in which the pilots had to avoid potential collisions with the other aircraft.
The Chalk 4 pilot subsequently lost sight of the Chalk 3 helicopter as the pilots of both helicopters were maneuvering for landing. The Chalk 4 helicopter pilot then landed the helicopter and was hover-taxiing to park when the helicopter collided with the Chalk 3 helicopter as its pilot was maneuvering it to land on the runway. Before the flight, the flight lead pilot presented briefing slides to the group of pilots; however, the slides did not provide any procedures for a loss of visual contact while flying in formation.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to see and avoid the preceding helicopter while maneuvering for landing. Contributing to the accident were the flight lead pilot’s inadequate preflight briefing and in-flight instruction to the formation pilots, which resulted in the loss of the formation flight's integrity and the pilots’ situational awareness within the flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA13LA022
- Event ID
- 20121015X10207
- Case number
- ERA13LA022
- 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. 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: b9c2e0c1c6aa97165b30b0a86ed996a04ab9a6571dc7e965f8128d22d82f3bf5; retrieved 2026-09-13T18:21:53.412Z.