Experts examine weather on night of fatal Georgia wedding helicopter crash

Around the time a helicopter carrying a newlywed couple departed from their North Georgia wedding venue, the skies were potentially rainy and foggy with a 200-foot cloud ceiling, federal officials said in a preliminary safety report about the deadly crash.

Aviation experts said those conditions would have been difficult to navigate that evening when the helicopter, a Robinson R66, crashed in the Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area.

The groom, 25-year-old Dave Fiji, and the helicopter’s pilot, Nikhil Nargundkar, died. The bride, Jesni Sam, attended her husband’s funeral just a week after their wedding.

The National Transportation Safety Board recently released a preliminary report on the May 29 crash. The report did not conclude what caused the wreck, but it described weather conditions that evening and other technical details about the incident.

The helicopter, operated by metro Atlanta-based Prestige Helicopters, was “substantially damaged” when it went down around 9:50 p.m., just five minutes after it departed from The Revere wedding venue near Dawsonville, the NTSB said.

The ride ended in calamity when the helicopter first struck tall trees along rising terrain, the NTSB said in its latest report. The aircraft was en route to the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport.

Metro Atlanta-based aviation attorney and pilot Alan Armstrong and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University professor Robert Joslin, who both reviewed the preliminary report, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the helicopter was likely only a few hundred feet off the ground when it crashed, that the cloud ceiling was low, and that rain and nearby thunderstorms would have deteriorated flight conditions.

The NTSB cautioned against drawing conclusions, noting the preliminary report is only meant to document facts gathered so far. Since the wreck, the agency has said it has been investigating the impacts weather may have had on the flight.

“At this point, we can’t say if weather played a role in the accident. The preliminary report is just that, preliminary,” an NTSB spokesperson told the AJC via email.

A diagram provided by the NTSB shows the aircraft's path through a tracking system as well as its first tree strikes and the main wreckage site. (Courtesy of the NTSB)

Prestige Helicopters, whose website says it provides tours and charter flights, has not responded to multiple requests for comment since the deadly crash, including questions about the preliminary report.

The last signal from the helicopter’s tracking systems, recorded at 9:50 p.m., revealed it was 1,350 feet above sea level. The report does not specify the elevation of the terrain below, but the crash site sits in a hilly and heavily forested area. The NTSB told the AJC the agency cannot provide an estimated altitude for the aircraft when it struck the trees, though investigators are continuing to examine that.

Armstrong and Joslin also told the AJC by phone it’s difficult to tell for sure the helicopter’s altitude during the flight and when it crashed, but they made estimations using data from the report.

“It depends on where they were in that wooded area ... but this would really equate to just a couple hundred feet above the ground,” said Joslin, who previously served as the chief scientific and technical adviser for Flight Deck Technology and a flight test pilot for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Weather modeling near the crash site indicated the potential for light wind, a cloud ceiling near 200 feet above ground level, overcast clouds at 600 feet above ground level, rain and fog. The NTSB said they reviewed data from the National Weather Service and found the helicopter was near an area of moderate rain at the time of the crash.

“Two hundred feet above ground level, that is low. If the ceiling’s 200 feet above ground level, that means to stay out of the clouds, you’ve got to be below,” Armstrong said.

Jesni Sam speaks at her late husband's funeral on June 6, 2026, at Praise Community Church in Lawrenceville. She and Dave Fiji boarded a helicopter late May 29 after their Dawson County wedding, and the aircraft crashed not long after, killing Fiji. (Akili-Casundria Ramsess for the AJC)

The Weather Service also had issued an advisory at 8:55 p.m. for aircraft that signaled embedded thunderstorms moving toward North Georgia, according to the NTSB.

An aviation reporting facility located nearly 14 miles from the crash site reported 2 miles visibility with moderate rain and mist around 9:55 p.m., according to the report. The FAA confirmed with the AJC that, if you are flying a helicopter using visual references to the ground and sky, the “legal minimum visibility is generally 1 to 3 statute miles.” That margin can also vary depending on the airspace and altitude, the FAA added.

The NTSB said the data gathered for the report helps investigators understand the conditions at the time of the incident, but “they don’t, by themselves, tell us whether the flight was operating within or outside of FAA weather minimums or whether the weather contributed to the accident.”

Joslin said that while flying a helicopter, you want to maintain visuals of the ground and sky “throughout your whole flight, from beginning to end, en route, and the whole nine yards.”

The NTSB said it has found no anomalies with the airframe and engine that would have contributed to the collision.

During a review of the pilot’s logbook, the NTSB noted he obtained his instrument helicopter rating in August 2023 and his commercial pilot certificate later that fall.

According to Dawson County dispatch records obtained by the AJC, a 911 call alerting officials to a possible helicopter crash came in around 10:10 p.m. About 90 minutes later, a drone picked up heat signatures indicating a possible wreck site. As deputies walked into the woods searching for the aircraft, one heard “what sounded like a female yelling for help,” records reveal.

They ran toward the voice.

Shortly before 3 a.m. May 30, after cutting through the seat belt that had trapped the injured bride inside the wreckage, deputies were able to pull her free, an incident report details. Fiji was also located inside the helicopter and the pilot was found nearby.

A diagram from the NTSB shows the helicopter's main wreckage site and where other parts of the helicopter ended up. (Courtesy of the NTSB)

At Fiji’s funeral on June 6 at Praise Community Church in Lawrenceville, his wife spoke of him fondly. The two had met about a decade ago and knew by their 20s they wanted to spend their lives together.

“I saved recipes I thought he would like; I spent a significant amount of time daydreaming about our future and making all kinds of plans for us to do together and with our families. I was looking forward to cooking for him, washing his clothes, packing his meals and taking care of him the way he took care of everybody else,” Sam told a room of a few hundred mourners.