CEN12WA682 · Agusta Bell
Agusta Bell · Accident
From Bern to Bern
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12WA682
- 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
- Unknown · led by another country; figures from NTSB notifications
- API-reported fatalities
- 3 · 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
- Not recorded
Agusta Bell
- Category
- Helicopter · from aircraft type
- 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
- HB-XPQ
- Operator
- Heliswiss
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From BernTo Bern
- 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
- Non-U.S., Non-Commercial
- 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
- Not recorded
- 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
- Not recorded
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On May 24, 2012, about 1545 UTC, an Agusta-Bell 206B Swiss registration HB-XPQ, owned and operated by Heliswiss, was destroyed when it collided with a cable and crashed in a mountain forest, near Eggschwand, Switzerland. A post-impact fire ensued. The two pilots and one passenger on board were fatally injured. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed at the time of the accident. The foreign, non-scheduled local training flight departed Bern, Switzerland at an undetermined time.
The helicopter's engine was examined at Rolls-Royce North America, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, on April 17, 2013. The examination revealed no mechanical damage that would prevent normal engine operation.
This investigation is under the jurisdiction of the government of Switzerland. Any further information regarding the investigation can be obtained from the Swiss Accident Investigation Board at:
Swiss Accident Investigation Board Aviation Division Aeropole 1, Route de Morens, 1530 Payerne Switzerland Telephone: +41 26 662 33 33 Facsimile: +41 26 662 33 01 E-mail: info@sust.admin.ch
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12WA682
- Event ID
- 20130130X74407
- Case number
- CEN12WA682
- 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: 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: b87bbdce9cf5ac145d29179686238094d772d72617313ce9cfe9af8ad317219b; retrieved 2026-09-14T15:52:22.423Z.