FTW96LA176 · Raven S-66A
Raven S-66A · Accident: hard landing
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW96LA176
- Event typeAccident: someone killed or seriously injured, or the aircraft substantially damaged (NTSB definition). Incident: an occurrence that affected or could have affected safety, short of that. Glossary
- Accident
- InvestigationHow far the investigation had got when the record was published: preliminary, ongoing, final or completed. Unknown where the source does not say. Glossary
- Completed
- API-reported fatalities
- 0 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- OperationWhat kind of flying it was, grouped by the rules it flew under: airline (US Part 121), air taxi and commuter (Part 135), general aviation (Part 91 and similar), military or government. Glossary
- General aviation
- WeatherVisual meteorological conditions (VMC): good enough to fly by looking outside. Instrument conditions (IMC): cloud or low visibility, flying by instruments. Glossary
- Visual Meteorological Cond
Raven S-66A
- Aircraft type
- Raven S-66
- Category
- Balloon
- RegistrationThe aircraft's tail number, such as N12345 or G-ABCD. Registrations are reissued, so the same one years apart can be a different aircraft. Glossary
- N2814D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From No airportTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- Not recorded
- Flight rulesThe regulations the flight operated under: in the US, Part 91 (general aviation), Part 121 (airlines), Part 135 (air taxi and commuter) and others; for flights abroad, the NTSB's coarser commercial or non-commercial code. Glossary
- Part 91: General Aviation
- Phase of flightThe stage of the flight when things started to go wrong: standing, taxi, takeoff, initial climb, en route, maneuvering, approach or landing. Glossary
- Landing
- First occurrenceThe single coded event the NTSB judges best describes what happened (records from 2008 on). Older records name the first occurrence in the sequence instead. Glossary
- Hard landing
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- None
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Crew/group briefing, inadequate
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Two of the passengers stated that they received 'no briefing before the balloon ride started.' The pilot reported that the 'wind was calm for a normal takeoff.' The pilot further stated that during the flight, the 'wind picked up [from] the NE 10 to 12 mph at 200 feet AGL.' When the pilot descended the balloon for a landing, the balloon 'landed near the edge of a grassy field.' One of the passengers reported that 'the balloon impacted the ground and bounced 30 to 40 feet before impacting the ground again.' The pilot reported that the basket was 'dragged about 150 feet and came to a stop on its side.' According to the injured passenger, 'approximately 20 seconds before the basket hit the ground, the pilot told the passengers to crouch below the basket top and bend their knees.' She reported that she didn't know that 'there was anything wrong; and didn't have any expectation of what to do for the landing until he said that.'
Probable cause
The pilot's inadequate briefing of his passengers. A factor was the high wind.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW96LA176
- Event ID
- 20001208X05564
- Case number
- FTW96LA176
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (4)
- Unreviewed is an editorial label, not an investigation status. API-sourced is not report-checked or human-reviewed. Explicit event totals are used without summing aircraft injury tables; onboard allocation is withheld. Unknown values remain unknown. The operation category is mapped from the NTSB-reported FAR part and has not been reviewed.
- Filled from the NTSB case API where the bulk record had no value: investigation status, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date, which is the same as the UTC date the NTSB stores.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 958dfbb34f7c5374f4b95e0d7b676edc2a86ef8eb37550728fdc255ca9e6672c; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:49:12.179Z.