CEN24LA088 · Eurocopter AS 350 B2
Texas Department of Public Safety Eurocopter AS 350 B2 · Accident: powerplant system/component malfunction/failure en route
From Del Rio International Airport (DRT) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN24LA088
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Eurocopter AS 350 B2
- Aircraft type
- Eurocopter AS-350
- 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
- N204TX
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Del Rio International Airport (DRT), Del Rio, TXTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 21 years (built 2003)
- 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
- En route
- 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
- Powerplant system/component 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 power plant
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The flight crew had competed their aerial observation and were enroute to the destination airport. While enroute, the pilot felt a violent yaw to the right, saw the engine low pressure annunciator illuminate, and heard the low rotor horn. After the engine lost power, the pilot transferred the flight controls to the copilot, who performed an autorotation and landed the helicopter in a brush-covered field. Postaccident examination and testing of the engine revealed that the engine’s fuel control unit (FCU) control lever arm was broken. Metallurgical examination of the control lever arm revealed it had failed due to a fatigue fracture which resulted in a loss of fuel control to the engine and fuel starvation.
Probable cause
The fatigue failure of the fuel control unit control lever arm, which resulted in fuel starvation, and a loss of engine power.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN24LA088
- Event ID
- 20240112193642
- Case number
- CEN24LA088
- 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: local date, investigation status, cause areas. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2024-01-12.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 20b73121a46ffb191ba78a1a16cce54da333ede694a5b590dea53be6edb9f36d; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:26:00.114Z.