Los Angeles Airways Flight 841
Sikorsky S-61L · Mechanical failure
From Anaheim Heliport to Los Angeles Intl Apt
Event
- 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
- Unknown
- Event fatalities
- 23 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- Occupants
- Unknown
- Survivors
- 0
- InjuriesFatal: death within 30 days. Serious: over 48 hours in hospital within a week, most broken bones, severe bleeding, nerve or organ damage, or serious burns. Minor: anything less. Glossary
- 0 serious · 0 minor (NTSB)
- 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
- Airline
- 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 S-61L
- Aircraft type
- Sikorsky S-61
- 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
- N303Y
- Operator
- Los Angeles Airways
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Anaheim HeliportTo Los Angeles Intl Apt
- 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
- Part 121: Air carrier (scheduled domestic passenger service)
- 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
- Main rotor failure
- 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
- Miscellaneous › Written cause
- Rotorcraft › Other
Approximate · Coordinates from the Wikipedia article; not checked against an investigation report.
From the Wikipedia article
Los Angeles Airways Flight 841 was a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter that crashed at 5:50 p.m. on Wednesday, May 22, 1968, in the city of Paramount, California. All twenty passengers and three crew members were killed. The aircraft was destroyed by impact and fire. The probable cause of the accident was a mechanical failure in the blade rotor system, which then allowed one blade to strike the side of the fuselage. As a result, the other four blades were thrown out of balance. All five rotor blades then broke and the rear fuselage and tail separated from the rest of the airframe. The cause of the mechanical failure is undetermined. At the time, it was the worst helicopter-related accident in U.S. aviation history, not to be surpassed until the 1986 Grand Canyon mid-air collision which killed 25.
Los Angeles Airways (LAA) Flight 841 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from Disneyland Heliport in Anaheim, California to Los Angeles International Airport, under visual flight rules. The flight was heading west at 2,000 ft over Paramount, California when air traffic controllers received a distress message from pilots: "L.A., we're crashing, help us." The helicopter crashed onto a dairy farm and burst into flames. N303Y, a Sikorsky S-61L helicopter, serial number 61060, had accumulated 12,096 total flying hours prior to the accident.
Much of the debris was contained in the dairy farm where the helicopter crashed. The tail rotor was discovered one block east of the crash site in a used truck yard. The aircraft was damaged due to the impact and the fire caused by the crash.
Among those killed was a group of nine vacationers from Ohio; a Hunt-Wesson Foods executive; the mayor of Red Bluff, California; and a University of California, Berkeley professor.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Los Angeles Airways Flight 841” (revision 1368787465, retrieved 2026-09-18) by its authors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Extracted as plain text: references, tables, images and some sections are left out. Read the article
NTSB remarks
BLADES UNCONTROLLED IN LEAD/LAG AXIS STRUCK ACFTROTORCFT-M/R DAMPER ACTION LOST.CAUSE UNDETERMINED
NTSB's remark from its 1962–1981 archive, as recorded (abbreviated, at most 98 characters): the archive has no narrative
Sources
Wikipedia article: Los Angeles Airways Flight 841
- Revision
- 1368787465 · 2026-08-11 · retrieved 2026-09-18
- Wikidata
- Q6681951
- Licence
- Text CC BY-SA 4.0, by the article's authors; Wikidata CC0; town positions GeoNames (CC BY 4.0)
NTSB record
- Event ID
- 19680522P023235
- Case number
- Unknown
- Dataset
- historical-pre1982
- Source SHA-256
- abe1a933b4b73583d61684309f7f0610c281e3c1de3537c6471bf2a98ba6481d
Where each value comes from
- Record
- Wikipedia article "Los Angeles Airways Flight 841" (page 17808079, revision 1368787465); merged with NTSB case NTSB19680522P023235 (PRE1982 tblFirstHalf (one row per aircraft, grouped by date, place and time))
- Date
- NTSB record NTSB19680522P023235: PRE1982 DATE_OCCURRENCE
- Place and country
- Wikipedia infobox: site; country from NTSB record NTSB19680522P023235
- Map position
- Wikipedia: Wikipedia article coordinates
- Aircraft, operator and route
- NTSB record NTSB19680522P023235: PRE1982 REGIST_NO, ACFT_MAKE, ACFT_MODEL; gaps from Wikipedia infobox: aircraft type, registration, operator, origin and destination; route airports from the linked airport articles' Wikidata codes (OurAirports)
- Operation
- NTSB record NTSB19680522P023235: operated under Part 121: Air carrier (scheduled domestic passg.svc)
- Fatalities
- NTSB record NTSB19680522P023235: PRE1982 TOTAL_ABRD_FATAL of each aircraft, plus people on the ground and others outside the aircraft
- Ground fatalities
- NTSB record NTSB19680522P023235: events.inj_f_grnd
- Summary
- Wikipedia infobox: summary
Source notes (4)
- One occurrence in two sources, merged: the Wikipedia article "Los Angeles Airways Flight 841" and NTSB case NTSB19680522P023235, matched by the same aircraft registration and date. For this US event the NTSB's values are used where the two differ; each value names its source.
- From NTSB's 1962-1981 archive (PRE1982), which holds at most a short remark (98 characters, abbreviated) instead of a narrative; the accident type, phase of flight, causes and conditions are NTSB's codes, decoded as the archive defines them.
- Reviewed means this record passed the site's consistency check, not that it was checked against a narrative or report - there is none to check against.
- The operation category is mapped from the archive's operator and operation codes and has not been reviewed.