FTW97LA068 · Raven S-60A
Raven S-60A · Accident: hard landing
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW97LA068
- 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-60A
- Aircraft type
- Raven S-60
- 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
- N4396K
- 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 · flare/touchdown
- 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
- Passenger › Procedures/directives, not followed
Approximate · Estimated position: the centre of Rio Rancho, NM, the place the record names. Not the accident site.
NTSB narrative
At takeoff, the surface wind speed was less than 4 knots. However, by the time of landing, the wind speed had increased to 12 to 15 knots. The pilot stated that the 'approach was normal with passengers braced for a high speed landing.' She followed 'standard procedure' for a high speed landing and pulled the top out of the balloon at about 15 to 20 feet agl. As the top was pulled, the balloon was 'hit by a windshear causing the air to exit faster than normal, and therefore, a hard landing.' According to one of the passengers, who was a commercial balloon pilot, there was nothing 'unusual or threatening to our normal descent in preparation for a landing. The 'windshear' seemed to 'throw' us straight down.' During the touchdown, one of the passengers, who was a balloon student pilot, broke his arm when he slid forward and fell against one of the propane tanks.
Probable cause
The passenger's failure to follow recommended procedures to properly brace for a high wind landing. A factor was the windshear.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW97LA068
- Event ID
- 20001208X07166
- Case number
- FTW97LA068
- 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: fbf458dbcd53b02e65c87f012538fd0aa50d48b24f5cd210232f9e399aa7a761; retrieved 2026-09-21T12:16:02.137Z.