CEN20CA326 · Hughes 369A
St Louis County Police Department Hughes 369A · Accident: hard landing
From Spirit of St Louis Airport (KSUS) to Spirit of St Louis Airport (KSUS)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN20CA326
- 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
- Government
- 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
Hughes 369A
- Aircraft type
- Hughes 369
- 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
- N911EP
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Spirit of St Louis Airport (KSUS), St Louis, MOTo Spirit of St Louis Airport (KSUS), St Louis, MO
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- 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
- Public Aircraft
- 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
- Landing
- 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
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instructor reported that during the instructional flight, he was manipulating the controls and accepted the option to land on the taxiway; he decreased the throttle for a full touchdown auto rotation. About 50 ft above the ground (agl), he flared the helicopter and leveled off about 5 to 10 ft agl. The instructor reported that everything seemed "normal" at this point. He then raised the collective, but the descent was not arrested, so he raised the collective full up. The helicopter landed hard and shook violently. The instructor closed the throttle to which stopped the fuel supply. The tailboom was substantially damaged. The flight instructor reported that there were no mechanical anomalies with the helicopter that would have precluded normal operation. The instructor added that he felt a slight tailwind after exiting the helicopter and that the tail wind caused a "vortex ring state" which stalled the main rotor blades.
Probable cause
The flight instructor's failure to maintain helicopter control which resulted in a hard landing while preforming a practice autorotation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN20CA326
- Event ID
- 20200806X70122
- Case number
- CEN20CA326
- 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: 7cd36b52b9a5baa079632ac2d7aa34fbde69558a5bdc4be3482c989ffc3734fe; retrieved 2026-09-16T12:23:59.211Z.