ERA20LA229 · Bell 206 L1
Hmc Lift Bell 206 L1 · Accident: fuel exhaustion while maneuvering
From Coconut Creek, FL to Coconut Creek, FL
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA20LA229
- 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
Bell 206 L1
- Aircraft type
- Bell 206
- 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
- N5013G
- Operator
- Hmc Lift
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Coconut Creek, FLTo Coconut Creek, FL
- Aircraft age
- About 41 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 133: Rotorcraft Ext. Load
- 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
- Maneuvering · low-altitude flying
- 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
- Fuel exhaustion
- 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 › Fluids/miscellaneous hardware
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot was performing an external load flight in the helicopter and stated he checked "fuel status and aircraft systems" before hovering a load into position out of ground effect. At that time, the fuel gauge indicated between 65 and 70 lbs of fuel remained, and he estimated he had about 10 to 15 minutes of operational time remaining to complete the load. The pilot was focused on hovering the helicopter to maintain a 4-ft load height during load delivery when the engine lost power. He maneuvered the helicopter into the wind and away from the ground crew for the forced landing and made a full collective application before entering trees. The helicopter came to rest upright with substantial damage to the fuselage and tailboom. Examination at the accident site found no fuel in the helicopter’s fuel system. When power was applied to the helicopter at the accident site, the fuel gauge indicated 40 lbs, and the low-fuel caution light illuminated. Following recovery, the helicopter was serviced with fuel, and the fuel system worked as designed with no leaks. The engine was started and run with no anomalies noted. The fuel quantity indicator showed 40 lbs above the actual quantity throughout fueling and defueling testing. It could not be determined if the 40-pound discrepancy was due to an out-of-calibration condition pre-accident or to impact forces. The low-fuel caution light, which operated independently of the fuel quantity indicating system, extinguished and illuminated properly during testing. It is likely the light illuminated during the accident flight but was not seen by the pilot due to his attention being outside the helicopter while hovering and maneuvering the load into position. Examination of aircraft and fueling records revealed that the fuel consumption rate of the helicopter over the 4 hours before the accident was about 38 gallons per hour, which was consistent with the helicopter’s mission profiles during that time period of both cruise flight and hover out-of-ground-effect external load operations. The accident is consistent with the pilot inadequately planning for the fuel required to complete the flight, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion.
Probable cause
The pilot’s inadequate fuel planning, which resulted in a total loss of engine power due to fuel exhaustion. Contributing to the accident was the pilot’s failure to recognize the illumination of the low-fuel caution light.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA20LA229
- Event ID
- 20200625X33153
- Case number
- ERA20LA229
- 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, cause areas. 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: 2a49a31275a3221712da1c12c77c0fdcd30b7ab47cbf3f90269624884c04a63c; retrieved 2026-09-16T11:56:13.124Z.