WPR13IA020 · Agusta A119
TriState CareFlight Agusta A119 · Incident: ground collision while standing
From Kingman Airport (IGM) to Kingman Airport (IGM)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR13IA020
- 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
- Incident
- 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
Agusta A119
- Aircraft type
- Agusta A119
- 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
- N207CF
- Operator
- TriState CareFlight
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Kingman Airport (IGM), Kingman, AZTo Kingman Airport (IGM), Kingman, AZ
- Aircraft age
- About 12 years (built 2000)
- 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
- Standing · engine(s) operating
- 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
- Ground collision
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Minor
Cause areas
- Organizational issues › Management
- Personnel issues › Psychological
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After arriving at the site of the vehicle accident, command post personnel advised the emergency medical services (EMS) flight crew that they did not have a patient for them and that the flight crew was authorized to depart. An EMS crewmember reported that he requested that the vehicle traffic, which had been stopped as a result of the traffic accident, be held until they departed. The on-scene fire department captain, who was in charge of directing the arriving and departing aircraft and had left the area before the helicopter departed, also requested before his departure that ground traffic be held until the helicopter had lifted off. However, on-scene law enforcement personnel who were controlling the traffic stated that they had not received either request. During the helicopter's engine startup, which the operator authorized the pilot to perform whether ground traffic was moving or not, one flight crewmember was positioned outside of the helicopter directing ground traffic around the helicopter's right side. The crewmember subsequently boarded the helicopter, and, shortly after, a truck collided with the tips of the helicopter's main rotor blades, which resulted in significant damage to the truck and minor damage to the helicopter's main rotor blades. If standard traffic incident management procedures had been strictly adhered to by the agencies involved, it is likely that this event would not have occurred.
Probable cause
Insufficient clearance between a truck and the main rotor blades of a helicopter on the ground with the engine running because of the lack of on-scene coordination between the agencies that responded to and were tasked with managing the vehicle accident site.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR13IA020
- Event ID
- 20121022X93128
- Case number
- WPR13IA020
- 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 2012-10-20.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4473b94c103764677f4a9489d042ab8d5c7cf727a37118080dad74690832aa17; retrieved 2026-09-15T20:15:10.031Z.