GAA17CA178 · Schweizer 269C 1
Schweizer 269C 1 · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure en route
From Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN) to Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN)
Event
- NTSB case
- GAA17CA178
- 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
Schweizer 269C 1
- Aircraft type
- Schweizer 269
- 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
- N614TA
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN), Ormond beach, FLTo Ormond Beach Municipal Airport (OMN), Ormond beach, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 19 years (built 1998)
- 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
- En route
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor of the helicopter reported that, about halfway through the flight, he "discovered that the throttle control was inoperative" and stuck in the high rpm setting. He turned the helicopter back to the departure airport and briefed his student on the situation. Upon being cleared to land, he executed a "running landing" and performed a go-around on the first try. On the second try, the skids made hard contact with the runway, and the helicopter came to a stop.
A postaccident examination revealed that the helicopter had sustained substantial damage to the fuselage.
The flight instructor reported that the throttle cable outer housing separated from the inner solid housing at the throttle linkage and that the internal wire could flex outside of the housing.
Probable cause
The separation of the throttle cable’s outer housing from the inner housing at the throttle linkage while at a high-power setting, which prevented the pilot from being able to control the throttle and execute a proper landing flare and resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record GAA17CA178
- Event ID
- 20170221X44737
- Case number
- GAA17CA178
- 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: 0ab6217bfd6b4211469e7b42772f06c7000254b224172bb0c9a6bbfa5cfe479b; retrieved 2026-09-16T05:01:19.366Z.