ERA26LA100 · Bell 47G-3B
Bell 47G-3B · Accident: loss of control in flight during landing
From Plant City Municipal Airport (PCM) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA26LA100
- 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
Bell 47G-3B
- Aircraft type
- Bell 47
- 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
- N347BH
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Plant City Municipal Airport (PCM), Plant City, FLTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 64 years (built 1962)
- 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
- Landing
- 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a solo flight, the student pilot set up an approach to an off-airport landing area. The pilot stated that after he initiated the flare, he applied left anti-torque pedal in preparation for landing. The pilot thought that a gust of wind caught the helicopter’s tail rotor, after which he lost control of the helicopter, which subsequently impacted the terrain. The helicopter was destroyed by a postimpact fire. The pilot reported that there were no preaccident mechanical malfunctions or failures with the helicopter that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
The student pilot’s loss of helicopter control during landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA26LA100
- Event ID
- 20260130202364
- Case number
- ERA26LA100
- 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: dca4d92782fd272ddde09d2a10ea65fbe89f7d7ba21ad8d3443d6d09fff9a912; retrieved 2026-09-16T20:42:22.212Z.