DEN99LA010 · Aerostar RXS8
Aerostar RXS8 · Accident: hard landing
From Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99LA010
- 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
Aerostar RXS8
- Aircraft type
- Aerostar RXS8
- 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
- N9105Z
- Operator
- Mary E. Moore · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Albuquerque International Sunport (ABQ), NMTo 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
- Pilot in command › Touchdown, intentional
- Weather condition › High wind
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
According to the pilot, the wind was 2 to 3 knots at the time of launch. As she prepared to land, the wind had increased to 12 to 15 knots. The pilot stated that 'the landing sites in the direction we were heading were small, so I started briefing my passengers about landing.' She further instructed her passengers that, because of the small landing sites available, 'they might need to land with the top out and the propane off.' After clearing several utility lines and trees, the pilot directed a passenger to pull the top out of the balloon and she turned off the propane fuel. The pilot stated that they 'hit the ground firmly and stopped in 20 feet, there was no bounce.' One passenger dislocated her ankle and broke her leg upon impact. The balloon was not damaged.
Probable cause
The high wind condition and the pilot's subsequent intentional hard touchdown. A factor was the small landing area that was available to the pilot.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99LA010
- Event ID
- 20001211X11242
- Case number
- DEN99LA010
- 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: a982e73afd2313eb44183796a43726c62af4e6568e34033cad51ddc5ff17074c; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:19:39.828Z.