The pilot of a small Cessna died Wednesday evening after the plane veered off course while coming down a runway in central Pennsylvania and struck a state police helicopter that was hovering a few feet off the ground. Two troopers on board the helicopter survived.
The crash happened about 6:52 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 19, at Carlisle Airport in Cumberland County, about 110 miles west of Philadelphia and roughly 17 miles west of Harrisburg, according to state police. The two aircraft were a two-seat Cessna 150 and a Bell 407 helicopter flown by the Pennsylvania State Police, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
The pilot of the Cessna was believed to be the only person aboard and was declared dead at the scene. State police withheld his name at Wednesday night’s briefing, pending notification of his family. Bivens said the plane was based in Carlisle.
How the collision happened
The helicopter crew was running a routine training exercise on a grassy strip next to a runway. The Bell 407 was hovering several feet off the ground when the Cessna came in behind it, lined up with the runway, and then veered hard to the right.
“As that Cessna came down along that runway for an unknown reason, it veered hard to the right,” acting State Police Commissioner Lt. Col. George Bivens said at a news conference. “At the last moment, it struck the helicopter from the rear.” The troopers, he said, “would not have been able to even see that airplane approaching them.”
The plane hit the helicopter’s tail rotor first, then slammed into the main rotor system. The Cessna broke apart a short distance away. The helicopter lost its blades and tail boom, rolled across the ground, and came to a stop on its side.
Bivens did not hold back on how bad it looked. “When I say it was a very violent crash, that plane was cut into a lot of pieces,” he said. Part of the investigation, he added, will be confirming the pilot was truly the only person on board.
The trooper who pushed out a window
Both troopers were trapped inside the wrecked helicopter after it stopped moving. Corporal Bryce Corman forced open a window, climbed out, and then reached back to pull Trooper Jason Mills out through the same opening.
They got out with the damaged aircraft still a fire risk. Rescuers on scene were worried the wreckage could catch fire, which made the few seconds the two men spent getting clear matter even more, according to state police.
Corman and Mills are members of the state police’s aviation unit, based at Capital City Airport near Harrisburg. Gov. Josh Shapiro identified them both as pilots. They had been the ones running the drill when the plane came down the runway.
Both troopers came out with minor injuries
Corman and Mills were airlifted to Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and arrived as Level 1 trauma patients. Given what happened to the aircraft, the outcome was better than anyone had reason to expect.
“Both of them, thankfully, came out with just minor injuries and are stable,” said Dr. Ashley Ludwig, trauma medical director at the hospital. One was in line to be discharged that evening, Ludwig said. The other was admitted for observation.
“Tonight could have been much worse. Tonight could have been much more tragic for our state police family. Thank God it wasn’t,” he said at a news conference at the hospital.
The governor said he met with both troopers and their families at the hospital. He also asked people to keep the family of the Cessna pilot in mind. “Lori and I join Pennsylvanians tonight in praying for the family of the Cessna 150 pilot who was killed,” he said in a statement.
An airport with no control tower
Carlisle Airport does not have an air traffic control tower. There is no controller telling pilots when to land, when to hold, or where other aircraft are. That job falls to the pilots themselves.
Instead of a tower, pilots at the field share a common radio frequency. They announce their moves and listen for everyone else, calling out when they are turning onto a runway or coming in to land. It is a system that works when everyone is talking and paying attention.
There was traffic on that frequency Wednesday evening. “There was some communication on that frequency. We’ll have to, as part of the investigation, sort all of that out,” Bivens said, according to his remarks at the briefing.
What the investigators want
The National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation, with the FAA and the state police assisting. FAA officials reached the crash site within about an hour. Two NTSB investigators headed to Carlisle overnight.
Investigators already have something useful to work with. State police secured video and photographs that could help piece together exactly how the Cessna and the helicopter came together in those final seconds, according to officials.
The wreckage will be documented at the site and then moved to a secure facility for a closer look. The NTSB typically publishes a preliminary report about a month after an accident, and that early document usually lays out the basic facts rather than a cause.
The NTSB also put out a call for witnesses. Anyone who saw the crash or has relevant information was asked to email witness@ntsb.gov, the agency said in a statement.
Shapiro said he called U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directly to ask the FAA to speed up its response. The crash site sits in South Middleton Township, in the 200 block of Petersburg Road.
Was it a midair collision or a ground crash
There is a small disagreement over one detail. The FAA and NTSB initially described the crash as a midair collision. State police did not say whether the helicopter was off the ground when it was hit.
Bivens and other officials described the Bell 407 as hovering several feet off the ground in the grass next to the runway when it was hit. Whether the helicopter was resting on the ground or just above it is one of the things the two federal agencies will nail down.
The distinction is not just wording. Where the helicopter was, and what the Cessna pilot could see from the runway, go straight to the question of how a small plane ended up on top of a hovering aircraft during a routine drill.
The state police fleet is down to five
The Bell 407 that was destroyed came out of a small fleet. Before Wednesday night, the Pennsylvania State Police had six helicopters. Now they have five.
The Bell 407 is a single-engine light helicopter used by the aviation unit for the kind of work state police fly every day, including searches, pursuits, and transports. Losing one leaves less to go around across a state of roughly 13 million people.
The Cessna 150 on the other end of the crash is one of the most common small planes in the country. It is a two-seat aircraft built as a trainer, the type of plane new pilots learn to fly in and hobbyists keep at small fields like Carlisle.
Shared airspace is under a microscope
Crashes that put helicopters and planes in the same patch of sky have drawn heavy attention since January 2025, when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a regional jet operating as American Eagle Flight 5342 near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, killing 67 people.
The Carlisle crash is far smaller in scale, but it lands in the same conversation about how aircraft avoid each other near the ground, especially at fields without a tower directing traffic. Investigators in Carlisle will be looking at exactly that.
For now, the hard facts are simple. One pilot is dead. Two troopers are alive because one of them forced open a window. And a full accounting of why a Cessna veered right at the worst possible second is still weeks, if not months, away, according to the investigators now working the case.
