ERA22LA340 · Robinson Helicopter Company R22 MARINER
Robinson Helicopter Company R22 MARINER · Accident: flight control system malfunction/failure while maneuvering
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA22LA340
- 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
- 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
Robinson Helicopter Company R22 MARINER
- 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
- N42WC
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 32 years (built 1990)
- 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
- Maneuvering · hover
- 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
- Flight control system malfunction/failure
- 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 propeller/rotor
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The instructor reported hearing a popping and banging sound while hover-taxiing during an instructional flight followed by an uncommanded right yaw. The instructor attempted to regain control, but the helicopter collided with the ground and rolled over onto its right side. Postaccident examination of the helicopter revealed that the tail rotor gearbox had fractured and that the tail rotor assembly had separated from the helicopter. Additional examination of the tail rotor blades, which had remained attached to the tail rotor drive shaft and gearbox, revealed corrosion and interior delamination of the blades. There was also erosion present on the blade leading edges, which likely provided a path for moisture to ingress, thereby resulting in the observed corrosion as well the failure of the bonding adhesive within the blade. It is likely that this condition resulted in an imbalance of the blades that imparted a vibratory loading onto the tail rotor gearbox that ultimately resulted in its failure during the accident flight. Review of partial maintenance records provided by the operator revealed that the tail rotor blades installed on the accident helicopter were not the blades that were noted in the maintenance logbooks, and the service history of the installed blades could not be determined.
Probable cause
Inadequate maintenance of the helicopter’s tail rotor blades, which resulted in a failure of the tail rotor drive system, and an inflight loss of yaw control from which the flight instructor was unable to recover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA22LA340
- Event ID
- 20220727105598
- Case number
- ERA22LA340
- 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, coordinates, 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: da6d2fce82ffe8e404e18c18a011cf2f96c30612f3d05f8df7ec117ebddd5406; retrieved 2026-09-16T15:31:33.295Z.