Los Angeles Airways Flight 841 was a

Sikorsky S-61 The Sikorsky S-61L and S-61N are civil variants of the SH-3 Sea King military helicopter. It was developed and produced by the American helicopter manufacturer Sikorsky Aircraft. The commercial version of the Sea King was developed during the ...

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

that crashed at 5:50 p.m. on Wednesday May 22nd 1968 in the city of

Paramount, California Paramount is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States. According to the 2010 census, the city had a total population of 54,098, down from 55,266 at the 2000 census. Paramount is part of the Greater Los Angeles Area and is bord ...

. All twenty passengers and three crew members were killed. The aircraft was destroyed by impact and fire. The

probable cause In United States criminal law, probable cause is the standard by which police authorities have reason to obtain a warrant for the arrest of a suspected criminal or the issuing of a search warrant. There is no universally accepted definition o ...

of the accident was a mechanical failure in the blade rotor system, which then allowed one blade to strike the side of the fuselage. The other four blades were then thrown out of balance and all five rotor blades broke and then the rear fuselage and tail separated from the rest of the airframe. The cause of the mechanical failure is undetermined. At the time, it was the worst helicopter-related accident in U.S. aviation history,"21 Aboard Killed as Copter Falls in Compton Park" William Tully; Dave Larsen ''Los Angeles Times''; Aug 15, 1968 pg. 1 not to be surpassed until the 1986 Grand Canyon mid-air collision which killed 25. Los Angeles Airways (LAA) Flight 841 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from Disneyland Heliport in Anaheim,

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

to Los Angeles International Airport. The flight was westbound at 2,000 feet over Paramount, California when air traffic controllers received a distress message from pilots: "L.A., we're crashing, help us." The helicopter crashed onto a dairy farm and burst into flames. N303Y, a Sikorsky S-61L helicopter, serial number 61060, had accumulated 12,096 total flying hours prior to the accident. Much of the debris was contained in the dairy farm where the helicopter crashed. The tail rotor was discovered one block east of the crash site in a used truck yard. Among those killed was a group of nine vacationers from Ohio; a Hunt-Wesson Foods executive; the mayor of

Red Bluff, California Red Bluff is a city in and the county seat of Tehama County, California, United States. The population was 14,710 at the 2020 census, up from 14,076 at the 2010 census. It is located north of Sacramento, south of Redding, and it is bisect ...

; and a

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

professor.

References

External links

NTSB report on Flight 841

Readers recall 50 years of Disneyland

Aviation Safety report
{{coord missing, Los Angeles County, California Aviation accidents and incidents in California 1968 in Los Angeles Los Angeles Airways accidents and incidents Airliner accidents and incidents caused by mechanical failure Disasters in Los Angeles Paramount, California Aviation accidents and incidents in the United States in 1968 May 1968 events in the United States Accidents and incidents involving the Sikorsky S-61

See also

References

External links