Final report, vision of Nevada helicopter crash involving Barwon Heads family released by NTSB

Shocking footage has emerged of a helicopter crash-landing in Nevada that left a Barwon Heads family with spinal injuries amid an expected multimillion-dollar settlement.

Shocking footage has emerged of a helicopter crash-landing in Nevada that left a Barwon Heads family with spinal injuries amid an expected multimillion-dollar settlement.

Cedomir and Amy Rakic and their two children, then 19 and 17, were returning from a Grand Canyon sightseeing tour when the chopper violently lost control and crashed while landing.

They filed a lawsuit in the US seeking more than $580,000 in damages from the tour operator in the months following the December 2022 accident.

Images of a Papillon Airways helicopter after it crash landed in Nevada in December 2022. A Barwon Heads family suffered serious injuries. They had been returning form a Grand Canyon sightseeing tour at the time of the accident.

The civil complaint, filed in Las Vegas, alleged they had been left with “life-altering injuries” due to the negligence and liability of Papillon Grand Canyon Tours and parent company, Papillon Airways.

However, it’s understood a much larger settlement could soon be reached for the family, who are being represented by powerful Missouri-based lawyer Brittany Sanders Robb.

Ms Robb’s firm lead a $149m wrongful death settlement against the same helicopter company last year, the biggest of its kind in US history.

It comes after the recent completion of an exhaustive investigation by the US-based National Transportation Safety Board into the crash involving the Rakic family.

Emergency services respond at the time of the crash in Boulder City.

The pilot and a fifth passenger, fitness influencer Andrea Simulis, were also seriously hurt.

Vision of the near-disaster, released last month by the NTSB, shows the helicopter completing about three full left turns before descending rapidly and hitting the ground.

According to the final report, the pilot’s failure to apply “anti-torque pedal input” while attempting to arrest a turn during a hover-taxi resulted “in a loss of directional control” and was the probable cause of the accident.

It also found inconsistent performance of the helicopter’s seats’ energy-absorption devices contributed to the severity of the injuries sustained by the occupants.

Images of the helicopter seats.

It’s understood one Rakic member suffered fractures at multiple vertebral levels and a fractured pelvis, while other injuries included lumbar fractures, a thoracic fracture, right tibia and fibula fracture and splenic laceration.

Papillon Airways has been contacted for comment.

The company was forced to pay $36.7m in January 2024 to the parents of British tourist Jonathan Udall, 31, who was among five people killed, including his wife, in a 2018 crash in the Grand Canyon.

The landmark $US100m cash settlement, approved by a Nevada judge in January last year, also ordered $112.5m be paid by Airbus Helicopters, the aircraft’s French manufacturer.

Ms Robb, whose firm represented the Udalls, said the Barwon Heads family had “came to Las Vegas for a holiday vacation and left with life-altering injuries”, saying the company “has a history of ill-fated helicopter flights involving its sightseeing tours”.

It comes as Ms Simulis, a fitness coach with more than 200,000 Instagram followers, addressed last month’s helicopter crash in New York that killed six people on the Hudson River.

“So many of you have reached out … to see how we are feeling processing this information given we were in a similar helicopter crash two years ago,” she said.
“All I can say is none of us know how long we have on this earth.”

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Originally published as Final report, vision of Nevada helicopter crash involving Barwon Heads family released by NTSB