ANC15LA076 · Airbus AS-350 BA
Airbus AS-350 BA · Accident: hard landing during autorotation
From 6S5 · Hamilton, MT to 6S5 · Hamilton, MT
Event
- NTSB case
- ANC15LA076
- 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
Airbus AS-350 BA
- Aircraft type
- Airbus AS-350
- 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
- N504WD
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 6S5 · Hamilton, MTTo 6S5 · Hamilton, MT
- Aircraft age
- About 31 years (built 1984)
- 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
- Autorotation
- 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
- Hard landing
- 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 propeller/rotor
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor, in the left seat reported that he was providing flight instruction to the commercial pilot, in the right seat, which included a series of hovering autorotations. According to the instructor, as the commercial pilot hovered the helicopter about 3 or 4 ft above the ground, the instructor initiated the hovering autorotation by reducing the floor-mounted throttle (fuel flow control lever) to about 70% N1, and the helicopter descended to about 1 ft above the ground. As the commercial pilot tried to cushion the touchdown, he inadvertently applied too much collective pitch, and the helicopter ballooned to a higher altitude. During the second descent, the main rotor rpm continued to decay, and the helicopter’s skids struck the ground. The instructor did not take control of the helicopter during this sequence. A postflight inspection revealed substantial damage to the tailboom.
Probable cause
The pilot's excessive collective application during an autorotation. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor's inadequate supervision of the training flight.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ANC15LA076
- Event ID
- 20150521X91139
- Case number
- ANC15LA076
- 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: 720e85513c491323c36d22d38006e5bb5528deec7b1e607d0e8ff287ca898998; retrieved 2026-09-16T02:20:37.071Z.