ERA20FA056 · Bell 407
Bell 407 · Accident: medical event on approach
From 0J6 · Headland, AL to 0J6 · Headland, AL
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20FA056
- 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
- 1 · 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
- Charter & commuter
- 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
Bell 407
- Aircraft type
- Bell 407
- 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
- N663SF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From 0J6 · Headland, ALTo 0J6 · Headland, AL
- Aircraft age
- About 19 years (built 2000)
- 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 135: Air Taxi & Commuter
- 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
- Approach
- 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
- Medical event
- 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 › Physical
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the flight nurse and paramedic, the flight was normal until the helicopter suddenly rolled to the left as they approached the helipad during landing. The pilot made no attempt to correct the roll, and the helicopter rolled onto its side and the main rotors contacted the ground. The pilot was immediately observed to be unresponsive and not breathing, and the flight nurse and paramedic began CPR as quickly as they could extricate the pilot from the cockpit. Autopsy of the pilot revealed severe coronary artery disease that placed him at significant increased risk for sudden death from an acute coronary event. Given the pilot's sudden inability to pilot the helicopter safely, the recognition by certified medical personnel that he was unresponsive and not breathing immediately following the accident, and the fact that he did not suffer enough blunt force trauma to have caused immediate cardiac arrest, it is most likely that the accident occurred because the pilot became incapacitated from an acute cardiac event.
Probable cause
Pilot incapacitation by a sudden cardiac event related to severe coronary artery disease, which resulted in a loss of helicopter control.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20FA056
- Event ID
- 20191225X93635
- Case number
- ERA20FA056
- 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: 1e59529a26b240737404c417727ae58ac0073bb277eb29173aa41195a57fd5dd; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:09:50.054Z.