CEN25LA302 · Robinson Helicopter R22 BETA
Robinson Helicopter R22 BETA · Accident: loss of control in flight while maneuvering
From Taylor Municipal Airport (T74) to Taylor Municipal Airport (T74)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN25LA302
- 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
- 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 R22 BETA
- 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
- N4684S
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Taylor Municipal Airport (T74), Taylor, TXTo Taylor Municipal Airport (T74), Taylor, TX
- Aircraft age
- About 26 years (built 1999)
- 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 · low-altitude flying
- 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
- Loss of control in flight
- 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 oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
- Personnel issues › Psychological
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the instructional flight, the flight instructor demonstrated each flight control to the student pilot at an altitude of 1 to 4 ft above the ground, and then allowed the student pilot to manipulate one flight control at a time. The student pilot manipulated the cyclic control several times with no issue but later allowed a slow drift to occur, which moved the helicopter away from its initial ground reference point. The flight instructor then took the flight controls and returned the helicopter to the reference point. During the student pilot’s last attempt at manipulating the cyclic control, the helicopter drifted to a dirt area, descended, and its skid contacted the ground. The helicopter rolled over and impacted terrain resulting in substantial damage to the fuselage, main rotor, and main rotor gearbox. The flight instructor stated he was too slow to take the controls from the student pilot, which resulted in the helicopter’s impact with terrain. The flight instructor stated there was no mechanical malfunction/failure of the helicopter that would have precluded normal operation. The Helicopter Instructor’s Handbook, FAA-H-8083-4, states in part, “…beginning the flight instruction at altitude is a good way to allow the student to manipulate all of the controls at one time and with a larger margin of error than beginning the flight instruction at a hover.”
Probable cause
The flight instructor’s inadequate supervision and delayed remedial action which resulted in a skid contacting the terrain. Contributing to the accident was the flight instructor’s improper judgement to allow the student pilot to manipulate the flight controls at a low altitude/hover.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN25LA302
- Event ID
- 20250804200693
- Case number
- CEN25LA302
- 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: 9f34e4947dfefef825e32f02e077de6574ada5744acdc3715ce32d8056c92234; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:10:05.984Z.