Crash of Airbus AS350 Helicopter at Palomar Airport (November, 2015)

On November 18, 2015, at 1623 Pacific standard time, an Airbus Helicopters AS350B3E, N711BE, departed controlled flight while landing on a dolly at McClellan-Palomar Airport, Carlsbad, California. The private pilot and the pilot-rated passenger were fatally injured; the helicopter sustained substantial damage. The pilot, who was the owner, was operating the helicopter under the provisions of 14 Code of Federal Regulations Part 91. The local personal flight departed Carlsbad at 1412. Visual meteorological conditions prevailed, and no flight plan had been filed.

The purpose of the flight was for the pilot to gain familiarity with the helicopter, which he had recently purchased and made a number of modifications to. The entire accident sequence was captured on a series of airport security cameras and the mobile phone cameras of multiple witnesses. Many of those videos were published in the immediate aftermath of the accident. These surveillance videos and ATC recordings were not.

About 2 hours before the accident, the helicopter departed from its dolly on the east end of the Premier Jet fixed base operator (“FBO”) ramp, which was located midfield on the south side of runway 6/24. After departure, line crew moved the dolly to the west end of the ramp. On return the approach and hover taxi to the ramp were uneventful. The pilot made a landing attempt on a dolly but landed only partially on the dolly, which caused the helicopter to pitch nose up and strike the ground with its tail. The helicopter hit the dolly with such force that the dolly broke free from the chocks securing it and spun around. (The pilot claimed on air that it had not been chocked.)

The helicopter climbed and spun upwards aggressively but stabilized after rotating 270° to the right. The pilot then landed the helicopter in an abnormal location that straddled the ramp and a taxiway. Ground crew personnel re-secured the dolly with chocks, and, after about 2 1/2 minutes, the pilot again attempted to land on the dolly, this time from the opposite direction. He made two unsuccessful attempts but was unable to maintain a stabilized approach each time. Although the pilot had the option to land on the ramp, he persisted in attempting to land on the dolly. (It was reported that the pilot was having difficulty adjusting to his newly installed stability augmentation system, fighting its inputs instead of accepting them.) On his third attempt the accident happened.

Onboard video showed that the pilot became incapacitated during the final ground collision. The passenger remained conscious after the impact and reached for the throttle on the pilot's collective control shortly after the helicopter started to spin, but the throttle position remained unchanged. He then attempted to brace himself against the glare shield, but he eventually became incapacitated after about 2 minutes due to his injuries, the forces imposed by the spinning helicopter, or both. He did not make any attempt to reach up for the engine-start selector or the fuel shutoff lever.

In the weeks preceding the accident, the pilot had expressed concern to multiple flight instructors that he was having difficulty adjusting to the flight characteristics of the helicopter. In particular, he found dolly-landings challenging.

The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable causes of this accident to be the pilot's loss of control during landing on a dolly. Contributing to the accident were the pilot's decision to conduct the flight without an instructor despite multiple flight instructors' recommendations to the contrary, his failure to land on the ramp when he experienced difficulty landing on the dolly, and his impaired decision-making, judgment, and psychomotor performance, due to his use of a combination of two psychoactive drugs, Benadryl and Xanax.

The complete NTSB accident report and data summary report can be found at http://tiny.cc/palomar.

A bit of trivia on a lighter note: the Airbus AS350 B3 variant was the first helicopter to land on the summit of Mount Everest.

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