ERA15CA089 · Robinson Helicopter Company R44 II
Robinson Helicopter Company R44 II · Accident: tailstrike during landing
From Vega Baja, PR (no airport) to Barranquitas, PR (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA15CA089
- 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
Robinson Helicopter Company R44 II
- Aircraft type
- Robinson R44
- 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
- N3183T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Vega Baja, PR (no airport)To Barranquitas, PR (no airport)
- Aircraft age
- About 8 years (built 2007)
- 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
- 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
- Tailstrike
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
After renting the helicopter from a flight school, the pilot took off and flew to a nearby town where he picked up two passengers. He then flew them to another town to attend a party. During the flights everything was normal. Upon arrival at their destination, the pilot began to circle and asked one of the passengers to call a friend who was on the ground on his cell phone, to check the landing area to make sure it was clear for him to land. After the pilot was told it was "clear for landing," he started a smooth descent "with all of the instruments in the green arc," to the landing area which was located on a dirt road on the ridge of a mountain. The landing was smooth and the pilot touched down lightly on the skids. While the helicopter had not fully set down and was still light on the skids, he began to check the "balance of the helicopter" before setting the collective to the full down position. When he moved the cyclic forward, the helicopter pitched forward. Then when he moved the cyclic aft to its previous position, the helicopter pitched aft and he heard a "big noise" and felt a vibration. He immediately "pulled" collective and rolled the throttle to the full throttle position to get the helicopter back into the air but, the helicopter started to spin clockwise and he could not stop the rotation, even with the application of full left pedal. He then leveled the helicopter while it was still spinning and tried to make it back to the landing site but, there was not enough power to keep it airborne. The left skid then contacted the ground and the helicopter rolled over on to its left side. Postaccident examination of the helicopter by a Federal Aviation Administration inspector revealed that the tail rotor assembly and tail boom were substantially damaged.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the helicopter while landing which resulted in a tailrotor ground strike and collision with terrain.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA15CA089
- Event ID
- 20150103X94415
- Case number
- ERA15CA089
- 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: 18f1cc2a3c405a02baacbac5dfba2cf0032b3e4dfc819b3e639c7b1bfa72a0a6; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:00:33.360Z.