Two helicopters collided near McMinnville Municipal Airport on Thursday afternoon, triggering a large emergency response and shutting down Highway 233 with no timeline for reopening. Fire officials rushed to the crash scene as an incident commander began closing roads near the airport, and officials said they had no immediate details on how many people were aboard either aircraft or their conditions.
According to The Oregonian/OregonLive, dispatch records placed the crash time at around 2 p.m. Thursday, though accounts of the exact time vary: News-Register also cited emergency dispatch reports pointing to roughly 2 p.m. east of the airport, while the Statesman Journal reported police received word of the collision at 2:14 p.m. near the intersection of Highway 154 and Stringtown Road. ABC7 reported that emergency crews responded around 2:15 p.m. following reports of a crash a few miles east of the airport.
KPTV similarly placed the reported collision near Southeast Highway 154 and Southeast Stringtown Road, with crews arriving around 2:15 p.m. The exact number of people involved and their conditions remained unknown Thursday, and officials had not described what led to the collision.
Highway 233 Closure Could Stretch On
The Oregon Department of Transportation announced just before 3 p.m. that Highway 233 was closed a mile west of Dayton because of the crash, with no estimate given for when it would reopen, the same closure also confirmed by the Statesman Journal, which reported that both Highway 154 and Highway 233 were shut down. ODOT said the closure was expected to be extended, and the agency advised drivers to seek an alternate route because the shutdown could last a while.
Local roads beyond the two highways were also closed, and the Yamhill County Sheriff's Office urged the public to stay away from the area while crews worked the scene. The News-Register reported additional closures on Airport, Cruikshank Stringtown and Starr Quarry roads, compounding the disruption for drivers in the area southeast of McMinnville.
NTSB Gathering Information
The National Transportation Safety Board said it was aware of the collision and was still gathering information as of Thursday afternoon, according to ABC7. No cause for the crash had been determined or publicly discussed by investigators at that point.
The McMinnville collision comes months after the NTSB released a preliminary report in January tied to a separate, unrelated helicopter crash that killed four people from Oregon near Superior, Arizona, on Jan. 2. In that case, investigators found the aircraft, an MD Helicopters MD369FF flying through a valley near Superior at about 10 a.m. Pacific time, struck a suspended line, according to Elkhorn Media Group. The outlet reported that a Notice to Airmen warning of a tight rope roughly three nautical miles south of Superior Municipal Airport had been active at the time, and that the NTSB retained the wreckage and sections of slackline webbing found embedded in the helicopter's vertical stabilizer for further examination. That earlier case remains a separate investigation with no connection established to Thursday's McMinnville collision.
For now, officials in Yamhill County are focused on securing the crash site and keeping the public away from the closed roads near the airport. Drivers heading through the area should expect delays and plan alternate routes while Highway 233 and the surrounding closures remain in effect.
