CEN16LA284 · Texas Helicopter Corp OH 13H/M74A
Hendrickson Flying Service Texas Helicopter Corp OH 13H/M74A · Accident: ground collision while standing
From Minook, IL (no airport) to Minook, IL (no airport)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN16LA284
- 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
Texas Helicopter Corp OH 13H/M74A
- Aircraft type
- Texas OH-13
- 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
- N10009
- Operator
- Hendrickson Flying Service
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Minook, IL (no airport)To Minook, IL (no airport)
- Aircraft age
- About 37 years (built 1979)
- 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During reloading operations for an agricultural flight, the nurse truck was parked on the right shoulder of a road, facing west. The helicopter was parked on the elevated helipad on top of the nurse truck, facing north, with the engine running and rotor blades turning. The helicopter's tail boom and rotor disk extended about 8-10 ft over the road. As the loader was reloading the helicopter's product tanks, a westbound semi-trailer truck drove underneath the rotor disk and struck the helicopter's tail boom. The semi-trailer truck driver said he thought he had enough clearance to pass safely under the helicopter's tail rotor. The pilot said that if the nurse truck had parked closer to an adjoining field, the platform would have a tilt, making it difficult to land for servicing. It is likely that the semi-trailer truck driver failed to ensure that he had adequate clearance to pass under the helicopter and that the loader failed to park in a safer area for the reloading operations.
Probable cause
Failure of the truck driver to ensure that he had adequate clearance to pass under the helicopter and the failure of the loader to park in a safer area for reloading operations.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN16LA284
- Event ID
- 20160726X85117
- Case number
- CEN16LA284
- 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: 4c29cdb41f8acc429dfb4c23747bde701b689aa655de940a440730caac427856; retrieved 2026-09-16T03:42:20.007Z.