Helicopter crash statistics

Across the ten complete years from 2016 to 2025, this database records an average of 225 helicopter incidents a year worldwide. The figure for recent years is higher than for older ones, which reflects how much easier it is to find and verify a crash reported today than one from the 1990s, rather than a genuine rise in accidents.

An average of 161 deaths a year over the same period, from 4,155 deaths across the whole database. 1,301 accidents killed at least one person, which is 28.0% of all incidents recorded. The great majority of helicopter accidents are survived by everyone on board.

The most common identified cause is pilot error, accounting for 19.8% of all records. Wire strikes alone account for 175 accidents, a cause that is almost entirely preventable and recurs in nearly every month we publish. A large share of records carry no established cause, either because the investigation is open or because none was ever published.

Incident counts and death tolls do not line up. A cause that produces many minor accidents can be less deadly in total than one that produces few but severe ones.

By raw count, Robinson appears in more records than any other manufacturer, with 1,196 incidents, and the Robinson R44 is the single most frequently recorded type. That reflects how many are flying rather than how safe they are. Robinson and Bell light singles dominate the training and private fleets worldwide, so they dominate the accident record too. Without flight hours per type, no conclusion about relative safety can be drawn from these numbers.

United States accounts for 55.2% of all records, with 2,564 incidents. That is partly a genuine reflection of the size of the US civil helicopter fleet and partly a reporting effect: the NTSB publishes every accident in a searchable form, which few other countries do.

Civil and commercial operations make up the bulk of the record. Military aircraft account for 370 incidents, or 8.0% of the total. Military accidents are under-represented everywhere, because many air forces publish nothing, so the real share is higher than this.

Yes. July is the busiest month in the record with 573 incidents, and December the quietest with 270. Northern hemisphere summer brings more flying hours, more firefighting and more tourism, and the pattern follows the flying rather than the weather.

These are the ten accidents in the database with the highest death tolls.

This page cannot tell you that, and neither can any database of accidents on its own. An accident rate is accidents divided by flying hours, and the hours are not public for most of the world. What you will find quoted, usually from the US Helicopter Safety Team, is roughly 3 to 4 accidents per 100,000 flight hours for US civil helicopters, with about 0.5 to 0.7 of those fatal. Those figures cover one country and one sector. Everything on this page is a count of recorded events, not a rate, and counts rise when coverage improves as well as when accidents do.