Sunrise Airlines Kawasaki BK117-B2 accident
Kawasaki BK117-B2 · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Tataka temporary landing site to Yushan North Peak helipad beside Yushan Weather Station
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC14WA003
- 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
- Final · ASC final report
- API-reported fatalities
- 3 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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
- Charter & commuter
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Not recorded
Kawasaki BK117-B2
- Aircraft type
- Kawasaki BK117
- 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
- Foreign
- Operator
- Sunrise Airlines
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Tataka temporary landing siteTo Yushan North Peak helipad beside Yushan Weather Station
- 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., 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
- Landing
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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.
Documented · Crash site as stated in the Aviation Safety Council (ASC), Taiwan (now Taiwan Transportation Safety Board, TTSB) final report. No uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On October 16, 2013, about 1209 Coordinated Universal Time, a Kawasaki BK-117 helicopter, Taiwan Island registration number B-77009, operated by Sunrise Airlines, was destroyed following a loss of control while landing near Yushan N. Peak Weather Staion, Taiwan Island. Both crew members and one passenger received fatal injuries.
The AVIATION SAFETY COUNCIL, Taiwan is investigating the accident. As the state of manufacture of the helicopter engines, the NTSB has designated a U.S. Accredited Representative under the provisions of Annex 13 to the Convention on Civil Aviation to assist Aviation Safety Council (ASC) in their investigation.
All inquiries concerning this accident should be directed to ASC at:
Aviation Safety Council, Taiwan
11th Floor, 200, Section 3, Beixin Road, Xindian District
New Taipei City 231, Taiwan (R.O.C.)
Tel: 886-1-89127388
Fax: 886-2-8912-7399
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC14WA003
- Event ID
- 20131022X92734
- Case number
- ANC14WA003
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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.
- No bulk values were replaced by the NTSB case API.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 4cbca48ae856c0a4ffe111ebc272ffa30081d3e72e003c2d1f44be029cd4149a; retrieved 2026-09-14T16:05:41.164Z.
- Checked against the Aviation Safety Council (ASC), Taiwan (now Taiwan Transportation Safety Board, TTSB) final report on 2026-09-18. The report states the same date, fatalities, operator and damage. Taken from the report: ground fatalities, place, crash-site coordinates, departure, destination and type of operation. Shown unchanged where the report gives another value or wording: registration (shown Foreign; report B-77009). Not checked: flight number and aircraft type.