ERA22FA279 · Bell UH-1B
Bell UH-1B · Accident: collision with terrain/object (non-CFIT) during autorotation
From Logan County Airport (6L4) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22FA279
- 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
- 6 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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 UH-1B
- Aircraft type
- Bell UH-1
- 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
- N98F
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Logan County Airport (6L4), Logan, WVTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 60 years (built 1962)
- 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
- Collision with terrain/object (non-CFIT)
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- Organizational issues › Management
- Organizational issues › Support/oversight/monitoring
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On June 22, 2022, about 1645 eastern daylight time, a Bell Helicopter UH-1B helicopter, N98F, was destroyed when it was involved in an accident in Amherstdale, West Virginia. About 15 minutes after the flight departed, the helicopter impacted two powerlines and a rock face during a forced landing, and a postcrash fire ensued. The pilot and five passengers were fatally injured. The helicopter was operated by MARPAT Aviation under the provisions of Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91
Probable cause
the operator’s failure to adequately inspect the former military turbine powered helicopter, which allowed an engine issue to progress and result in a loss of engine power and a subsequent loss of control after the helicopter struck powerlines during a forced landing. Also causal to the accident were the following: 1) the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) inadequate inspection and maintenance standards for former military turbine powered aircraft operating with an experimental exhibition airworthiness certificate; 2) the operator’s use of those standards instead of more rigorous standards, which were readily available to the operator and previously used to inspect and maintain the helicopter; and 3) the FAA’s inadequate oversight of the operator, which did not detect the inherent risk associated with the operation.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22FA279
- Event ID
- 20220623105306
- Case number
- ERA22FA279
- 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: 2b7aeaf6eaf7d3891f58d4450fe885eaa62baf3e1964002721e7e415f956ccaf; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:46:19.390Z.