WPR25LA101 · Hughes OH-6A
Hughes OH-6A · Accident while taxiing
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR25LA101
- 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
- Ongoing
- 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
- 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
Hughes OH-6A
- Aircraft type
- Hughes OH-6
- 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
- N4191T
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 57 years (built 1968)
- 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
- Taxi
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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
No findings designated as a cause are recorded in the NTSB data yet.
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
On February 22, 2025, about 1620, a Hughes OH-6A, N4191T, was substantially damaged when it was involved in an accident near Santa Teresa, New Mexico. The flight instructor and pilot undergoing instruction were not injured. The helicopter was operated as a Title 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91 instructional flight.
The flight instructor had just flown in the helicopter with its owner earlier in the day, and the flight was uneventful.
The accident flight was intended to be refresher training for the pilot undergoing instruction, rather than a formal flight review. For about 30 minutes they performed a series of practice maneuvers and once complete the flight instructor took the flight controls and initiated a hover taxi from the end of runway 28 to the helicopter pad about 500 ft to the southwest. About midway through the taxi, they felt a shudder in the airframe and the helicopter immediately yawed to the right. The flight instructor moved the throttle to idle and proceeded to lower the collective. The yaw transitioned into a spin, and the helicopter struck the ground on the incline of a gravel pit. The helicopter came to rest upright on a southwest heading, with its tailboom severed just aft of the engine. The tailrotor assembly including the vertical and horizontal stabilizers were located about 100 ft behind the helicopter.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR25LA101
- Event ID
- 20250224199744
- Case number
- WPR25LA101
- 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. 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: bb131022daf6704b47528e8c9279fd117dac9e9c5b45b5148897fe1772aed4fd; retrieved 2026-09-16T19:40:57.910Z.