CEN25LA242 · Sikorsky UH60
National Guard Sikorsky UH60 · Incident: midair collision en route
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN25LA242
- 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
- Incident
- 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
- 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
Sikorsky UH60
- Aircraft type
- Sikorsky UH60
- 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
- UNREG
- Operator
- National Guard
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From not recordedTo not recorded
- 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
- En route · cruise
- 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
- Midair collision
- 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 July 7, 2025, about 1557 central daylight time, an unregistered Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter collided with an unregistered DJI Mavic 3T unmanned aerial vehicle (drone) near Ingram, Texas. The UH-60 received substantial damage to the tail rotor system and the Mavic 3T was destroyed. The pilot and occupants of the UH-60 were not injured, and the helicopter made a successful landing. The UH-60 was operated by the National Guard and the Mavic 3T was operated by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), as public use aircraft during flood response operations arising from the July 4, 2025, flooding of the Guadalupe River. Postaccident inspection of the helicopter by the operator revealed substantial damage to the tail rotor blades. According to the Texas DPS pilot who was operating the drone. He received instruction on mission plans from the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), that had been set up in response to the flooding in the area. Each drone team consisted of 2 pilots. One pilot would fly the drone, and the other would monitor radio frequencies and visually scan the area. They would receive a mapping mission to fly and once completed they would land the drone and relocate to the next assigned mapping mission. During operations, they would monitor several radio communication frequencies and if other aircraft traffic was heard in their area, they would descend to 50 ft above ground level (agl) and wait until the other aircraft traffic was no longer a factor and then resume their mission. The drone team was starting a mapping mission that was to fly a programmed grid pattern but were hand flying the drone to the start of the grid pattern. They did not see, nor did they hear any other traffic announce operations or positions in the area, and suddenly lost communication with the drone. After losing communication with the drone, they saw the helicopter make an emergency landing. The drone pilot reported that that the deconfliction strategy, that was in place at the time of the collision, was verbally passed down, and that drones were to operate at altitudes at or below 200 ft agl, and that manned aircraft would operate no lower than 400 ft agl unless a specific need required going lower.
Verbatim NTSB factual narrative from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN25LA242
- Event ID
- 20250709200494
- Case number
- CEN25LA242
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
Source notes (5)
- 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: 5105d67528ce53427c4dcd0a9235ae6326d1b851d4c5efdfef1c071768e77704; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:03:48.056Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative, which states these values explicitly: damage. The narrative states the UH-60 'received substantial damage to the tail rotor system' and that postaccident inspection 'revealed substantial damage to the tail rotor blades'.