With a passenger yelling “don’t do it,” the pilot of an Airbus Helicopters AS350 B3 made a second attempt at landing on an Alaska ridgeline, but the helicopter became engulfed by swirling snow, struck the ridgeline and rolled backward, killing five of the six people on board, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says.
In its final report on the March 27, 2021, accident in Palmer, Alaska, the NTSB said the probable cause was the pilot’s “failure to adequately respond to an encounter with whiteout conditions.” The report cited two contributing factors: the operator’s “inadequate pilot training program and pilot competency checks, which failed to evaluate pilot skill during an encounter with inadvertent instrument meteorological conditions” and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) principal operations inspector’s “insufficient oversight” of the operator, Soloy Helicopters.
At the time of the accident, the helicopter wa…
