Locations of some of the EGPWS warnings during the brief flight from Big Grand Cay.
The pilots of an Agusta AW139 had just departed from a Bahamas helipad on a middle-of-the-night flight to transport their boss’s daughter and a friend to Florida for medical treatment when they became spatially disoriented and the helicopter struck the water. The two pilots and their five passengers – also including, according to news reports, their boss and two additional friends – were killed in the July 4, 2019, crash.
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), in its final report on the accident, said the probable causes were “the pilots’ decision to take off over water in dark night conditions with no external visual reference, which resulted in spatial disorientation and subsequent collision with the water,” and their “failure to adequately monitor their instruments and respond to multiple EGPWS [enhanced ground-proximity warning system] warnings to arrest t…
