Officials cite 'layers of failure' in copter crash

WASHINGTON — A firefighting helicopter crash that killed nine people two years ago was caused by deceptions on the part of the company that leased the aircraft to the U.S. Forest Service and a lack of federal safety oversight, the National Transportation Safety Board determined Tuesday.

Carson Helicopters of Grants Pass, Ore., intentionally altered documents to exaggerate the helicopter's performance capabilities in order to win a Forest Service contract, the board said.

But the Federal Aviation Administration and the Forest Service missed several opportunities to uncover those problems, the board said.

"This accident had more to do with Carson's actions than the oversight entities' inactions," NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman said. "But the FAA and the Forest Service didn't hold up their end of the deal to oversee Carson's actions."

The accident points to a larger problem of a lack of safety oversight of nonmilitary aircraft operations by federal, state and local government agencies, board members said. FAA has said it doesn't have the authority to oversee the aircraft operations of other agencies.

Government aircraft operations "have no parent and no one wants to be responsible for them," Hersman said.

NTSB has alerted the Department of Transportation's Inspector General that Carson's actions may merit a criminal investigation, Hersman said.

The board's investigation showed the Sikorsky S-61N helicopter weighed 19,008 pounds when pilots tried to take off from a rugged mountaintop clearing near Weaverville, Calif., on Aug. 5, 2008. But the maximum weight to lift off at full power with no margin to spare was 18,445 pounds, they said. If Forest Service guidelines — which include a safety margin — had been followed, the weight shouldn't have exceeded 15,840 pounds, investigators said.

Carson also provided its pilots with procedures for estimating liftoff weight that eroded safety margins, the board said.

Two months after the accident, the FAA office in charge of overseeing Carson received letters from two pilots with knowledge of Carson's operations who expressed concern that the company was miscalculating helicopter weights, investigators said.

Investigators said that if FAA had provided NTSB with that information at the time, it would have helped them figure out sooner that the weight calculations were faulty. FAA was a party to the accident investigation and its inspectors were aware of the investigation, they said.