Helicopter Accidents in 2024: What the EASA Data Reveals

Why do helicopters crash? 💥

Every year, EASA releases a great document that helps to answer this question, and shows what’s catching pilots out, what’s killing crew, breaking aircraft, and coming back to screw up flight safety across Europe 🇪🇺

It’s a goldmine of information, so we’re going to show you the main take-aways in one overview.

No theories, no hangar talk, just hard data from every rotorcraft accident and serious incident in the last 12 months, compared to the last 11 years!

It’s broken down into 4 sections:

🔸 All Helicopter Operations
🔸 Commercial Air Transport (CAT)
🔸 Specialised Operations (SPO)
🔸 Non-Commercial Operations (NCO)

If you fly, teach, or manage helicopter ops, this is what you need to know before the next briefing!

*A little side-note: At this moment in time, EASA does not provide data on total helicopter movements per year, so drawing conclusions based on this data remains tricky – as we can’t correct for an increase or decrease in overall traffic. The same applies to the difference in reporting culture over time (for serious incidents).

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🔄 All Helicopter Operations

Let’s start with the bad news: 2024 had the most helicopter occurances of the last 12 years.

Let’s recap the average amount over the last 11 years first:

🔸 13.9 serious incidents
🔸 36.7 non-fatal accidents
🔸 8.5 fatal accidents

But as you can see in this graph, 2024 was worse:

We had:

⬆️ 38 serious incidents
⬆️ 37 non-fatal accidents
⬇️ 7 fatal accidents

So, less fatal accidents than the average, but more serious incidents and non-fatal accidents.

The silver lining is that fatalities have not increased compared to the other years. The 11 year averages are:

🔸 11.2 serious injuries
🔸 20 fatalities

While 2024 had:

⬆️ 14 serious injuries
⬇️ 14 fatalities

Take a look:

So what are the main accidents types over the last 5 years?

The top 5 looks slightly different to last year’s summary:

1️⃣ Loss of control in flight
2️⃣ Unknown (undetermined)
3️⃣ Abnormal runway contact
4️⃣ Airprox / ACAS alert / loss of separation / mid-air collissions
5️⃣ Collision with obstacles during take-off and landing

Here’s all of them listed based on amount of occurrences:

This means powerplant failure is no longer in the top 5, and abnormal runway contact has overtaken the airprox category.

EASA summarises that the top risks (remain) loss of control in flight, airborne collisions, and terrain collisions.

A perfect example of a loss of control in flight is the accident we covered here:

Fatal AW139 Crash after Departure in Fog at Night | The Why Spotlight #5

As to why these are the top risks for helicopter operations, we will come back to in a future article, although we have covered inadvertent entry into IMC here:

Inadvertent IMC: Are you Truly Prepared?

💰 Commercial Air Transport (CAT)

What’s commercial air transport? EASA defines it as:

“Any aircraft operation that transports passengers, cargo, or mail for remuneration or other valuable consideration”.

Think of HEMS / Air Ambulance / Offshore / Air Taxi / Sightseeing, anything that involves going from A to B while getting some sort of compensation for it.

The amount of European CAT helicopters as well as AOC holders has remained pretty stable: about 1,882 aircraft across 251 AOC holders. That’s roughly the same as 2023 (1868 helicopters and 259 AOC holders).

So what do the CAT stats look like? Let’s start with the accident types:

So, we have:

🔸 2 fatal accidents
🔸 8 non-fatal accidents
🔸 21 serious incidents

Resulting in:

🔸 4 fatalities
🔸 6 people seriously injured

The most notable thing here is the amount of serious incidents. It was only 1 last year, and 21 this year. This could be due to better reporting cultures, or an actually higher amount of serious incidents (it’s impossible to know for sure at this point in time).

So when did things go wrong the most? Let’s take a look at the different flight phases:

As expected, the cruise and landing phase are still the riskiest. We covered many reasons of this like downwind approaches:

The Downwind Approach: A Silent Killer

As well as landing site threats:

Don’t Let These 8 Helicopter Landing Site Threats Surprise You

So which operation did the poorest?

As per usual, HEMS (followed by air taxi):

What’s also worrisome is that we see an uptrend in accidents in the air taxi category again, just like last year.

🛠️ Specialised Helicopter Operations (SPO)

EASA defines Specialised Helicopter Operations as:

“Any operation other than commercial air transport where the aircraft is used for specialised activities such as: agriculture, construction, photography, surveying.”

Think of Construction / Sling Load / Powerline / Aerial Work / Surveillance / etc.

Over the last few years, this is what the accident data looked like:

In 2024, we are looking at:

🔸 1 fatal accident (similar to the average)
🔸 6 non-fatal accidents (slight reduction)
🔸 5 serious incidents (slight increase)

Resulting in:

🔸 1 fatality
🔸 3 people seriously injured

What flight phases were the largest contributors to things going wrong? Take a look:

When it comes to the type of operations, construction / sling loading came with the largest amount of accidents, followed by agricultural operations:

The top 5 here are:

1️⃣ External load related occurrences
2️⃣ Loss of control in flight
3️⃣ Low altitude operations
4️⃣ Unknown (undetermined)
5️⃣ Powerplant failure or malfunction

The powerplant failure is an interesting one to see in the top 5, compared to the other categories, but we are not ready to draw any conclusions from this.

The biggest risks here are obstacle collisions. EASA emphasises:

“Obstacle collision in flight is most risky in terms of aggregated risk, which is not surprising given the conditions and the common environmental factors that come with this type of operation. Helicopter pilots navigate the most harrowing environments known to flight, where recovery has no margin for delayed and human reaction.”

⛳️ Non-Commercial Helicopter Operations (NCO)

Especially here in the UK, non-commercial helicopter operations have had quite a few issues over the years.

Some of it has been cultural, but also stems from the fact that – by design – they come with less strict operational requirements.

NCO pilots often operate single pilot, without flight monitoring, formal SOPs, or robust SMS frameworks. It’s an area that (in our opinion) is still neglected by many local regulators across europe.

Think Training / Test flying / Ferry flights / Leisure flying / sometimes VIP flights / Private owners.

Let’s take a look at the total amount of accident first:

So, last year (2024) we had:

🔸 4 fatal accidents (similar to the average)
🔸 23 non-fatal accidents (slight reduction)
🔸 12 serious incidents (slight increase)

Resulting in

🔸 7 people lost
🔸 5 people seriously injured

As to the type of occurrences, have a look at this:

1️⃣ Loss of control in flight
2️⃣ Unkown (undetermined)
3️⃣ Abnormal runway contact
4️⃣ Powerplant failure or malfuction
5️⃣ loss of control on the ground

So what kind of operations had the most occurrences?

Flight instruction and pleasure flying are the biggest outliers here, just like last year.

The familiar killers persist:

🔸 Low-altitude manoeuvring
🔸 Overconfidence
🔸 Weather underestimation
🔸 Pushing into marginal VMC, especially in valleys or coastal haze, remains a major CFIT trigger
🔸 Maintenance and airworthiness issues
🔸 Privately operated machines sometimes lag on compliance or have deferred snags that would ground a CAT aircraft

💭 Conclusion: What Can we Learn From the Data?

Across all three categories, CAT, SPO, and NCO, the patterns repeat:

🔸 Loss of control remains the biggest threat for helicopter operations
🔸 CFIT is still deadly despite fewer occurances
🔸 Airborne collision risk is increasing
🔸 low altitude and external load operations drive SPO risks
🔸 CAT has had a significant increase in amount of serious incidents
🔸 Training remains the riskiest NCO category
🔸 EASA highlights that human performance deficiencies remain highly relevant for high risk events – technology alone won’t solve for this

But there’s progress. Serious incidents are up while fatal accidents stay flat or down, which could be a sign that the industry is catching problems earlier.

The next frontier is culture: turning data into behaviour change. The EASA review isn’t just numbers, it’s a mirror. If we want to cut those risk lines further, every pilot and operator needs to see their own operation in the trends.

You can find the 2025 EASA Safety Review (covering the 2024 data) that’s it here.