FTW98LA064 · Adams A55S
Adams A55S · Accident during an emergency descent
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW98LA064
- 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
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 1
- 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
Adams A55S
- Aircraft type
- Adams A55
- 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
- N1063V
- 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
- Emergency descent
- 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
- Miscellaneous/other
- 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
- Ground personnel › Procedures/directives, not followed
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot landed his hot air balloon several times to allow passengers to disembark and other passengers to board. On the last landing, he vented heat from the envelope to insure loss of buoyancy, then instructed one of the passengers to step out but to keep his weight on the basket. The passenger complied. The second passenger exited before the pilot could give similar instructions, and the balloon began to ascend. Unable to hold the balloon down, ground personnel released their weight from the basket. The pilot immediately pulled the vent line, but the balloon continued to ascend at a 'moderate rate.' The pilot then noticed a shadow hanging from the balloon and saw one of his ground crew members holding on to one of the rope handles, located along the bottom edge of the basket. The balloon was 15 to 20 feet in the air and continuing to ascend. The pilot continued to vent the envelope. The balloon reached a maximum altitude of 75 to 80 feet before it began to descend. When it was approximately 40 feet above the ground, the ground crew member said she couldn't hold on anymore. She fell to the ground, sustaining fatal injuries.
Probable cause
failure of the ground crewman to follow proper procedures. A factor relating to the accident was: the passenger failed to follow the pilot's verbal instructions.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW98LA064
- Event ID
- 20001208X09304
- Case number
- FTW98LA064
- 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: 1b9f061f57253ca0cf917f4fcc687b0a144161b4747e682f2c8c6b83bf942eab; retrieved 2026-09-20T22:44:26.571Z.