WPR20CA140 · Robinson R22 BETA
Robinson R22 BETA · Accident: hard landing during autorotation
From Caldwell Executive Airport (EUL) to Caldwell Executive Airport (EUL)
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR20CA140
- 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 R22 BETA
- Aircraft type
- Robinson R22
- 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
- N6703S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Caldwell Executive Airport (EUL), Caldwell, IDTo Caldwell Executive Airport (EUL), Caldwell, ID
- Aircraft age
- About 16 years (built 2004)
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight instructor reported that, during the instructional flight and while conducting a maximum-glide configuration autorotation, he and the student pilot set the rotor rpm between about 93% and 94%. The instructor began applying aft cyclic to slow the descent rate and to regain rpm; however, the descent rate did not decrease, so he applied more left cyclic to no avail and then increased the throttle. The helicopter landed hard at the most level attitude the instructor could make it, and it then bounced and came to rest. The tailboom was substantially damaged. The Pilot's Operating Manual contained a caution that stated to "increase rotor RPM to 97% minimum when autorotating below 500 ft above ground level." The chief flight instructor reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the helicopter that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to set the proper rotor rpm during a practice autorotation, which led to his failure to maintain a proper descent rate and resulted in a hard, bounced landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR20CA140
- Event ID
- 20200423X73125
- Case number
- WPR20CA140
- 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: aaa0e35f1f607c6a567b28f31287e92be8e1218e1880da7c8e7add19845fc385; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:30:25.868Z.