Carson Helicopters

Incidents and accidents

On 9 March 1996 a Carson Helicopters de Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter (reg. N245GW) departed Bagua, in Peru's Amazonas Region, on an aerial geological survey near the Cenepa River, in Peru's dense Amazon region jungle near the disputed border with Ecuador. The plane did not return to Bagua, and no communications were ever sent by the plane, with SAR operations turning out unsuccessful. The plane may have had run out of fuel and crashed as bad weather en route reportedly altered the planned course, leading to the aircraft's fuel becoming critical. No flight plan was filed. The occupants, an American pilot-in-command, an American survey operator, and a Peruvian Air Force observer, are presumed deceased.

On 9 June 2008 workers from Carson Helicopters sparked a fire in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge which burned for 111 days. Carson Helicopters had been in the process of completing a 1,110 acre clearing project to remove trees damaged by Hurricane Isabel in 2003 when sparks from logging equipment ignited the blaze A federal contract with Carson Helicopters allowed the company to keep valuable cedar recovered during the clean up effort in exchange for also removing unusable timber. The fire was declared out on October 7, 2008. Total cost to suppress the 4 month, 4,884-acre blaze has been estimated at over $12.5 million.

On 5 August 2008 a Carson Helicopters Sikorsky S-61N crashed on take off. The copilot and three firefighters escaped the burning wreckage and survived with serious injuries. The NTSB's preliminary report determined that the cause was a loss of power on take off probably caused by an engine failure. Relatives of the victims concerned by the change in the NTSB report filed a lawsuit against General Electric and on March 27, 2012 a jury unanimously ruled that the primary cause of the accident was the failure of the GE CT-58 engines. In 2015 former VP Steve Metheny was sentenced to prison for falsifying documents related to a 2008 crash that killed seven firefighters and two pilots. A federal jury had earlier found that the primary cause of the crash was the failure of the GE-designed engine, specifically issues with the engine's fuel control, of which GE had previously been notified.