A Transportation Safety Board report released Thursday recommends pilots think twice before practising potentially risky safety manoeuvres with passengers aboard.
It comes after a fatal helicopter landing in central Alberta claimed the life of a passenger.
The report examined a crash of a Bell Textron 206L-4, known as a LongRanger, which experienced a hard landing in July 2025 while conducting a private flight west of Red Deer with the pilot and one passenger on board.
They had made a 34-minute afternoon flight from a mountain lodge west of Sundre to a private farmland air strip near Benalto in Lacombe County, about 130 kilometres away.
The report said the pilot began practising autorotation — an emergency procedure typically used in helicopters when the engine fails.
The first autorotation landing was uneventful, but the report said a second attempt resulted in the helicopter pitching upward, banking and then descending rapidly before hitting the ground.
The passenger, a 54-year-old resident of Benalto, was killed, while the 63-year-old pilot, who was a resident of Lacombe County, was seriously injured, suffering a head injury.
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The TSB said medical or physiological factors, including fatigue, were not a factor leading to the hard landing.
The pilot held a commercial pilot licence — helicopter and a private pilot licence — and at the time of the crash, had logged about 3,500 hours of rotary-wing flying and about 1,800 hours flying that helicopter. His medical testing was up to date.
The TSB said the pilot had completed his proficiency check in that chopper in the month before the crash, as well as maintained a regular training schedule, conducting recurrent training flights with a flight instructor approximately every six months.
The training flights included helicopter handling and practice autorotations. The TSB said he’d completed a training flight the day before his most recent proficiency check and, in the 60 days leading up to the crash, had logged 33 flight hours in the LongRanger.
The report said that while practising autorotations is essential to helicopter pilot training, it’s riskier than regular flight, and exposing passengers to the elevated risk “should be carefully considered” before pilots do it.
“In Canada, there are regulations restricting emergency training with passengers during commercial operations but not during private operations,” the TSB report noted.
The report also said neither person on board wore a helmet. While not required, it said the pilot suffered a serious head injury.
It said an article was published in 2024 in Transport Canada’s Aviation Safety Letter, advocating for the use of a helmet for all helicopter operations.
That article titled, Look Like Maverick, Wear Your Helmet! noted a high percentage of helicopter accidents occur at low speed during the hovering phase. It said that in a rollover, the chopper’s main rotor blades strike surrounding obstacles or the ground with such tremendous force that “the shock felt by the occupants is brutal.”
A helmet can also protect the pilot during bird strikes where the bird smashes through the window, the article said.
The passenger was wearing their seatbelt. However, the TSB said that with the way the helicopter landed, the crash was not survivable for the passenger due to the force and direction of impact.
— With files from The Canadian Press
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