DEN99LA023 · Balloon Works FIREFLY 8B-15 FIREFLY 8B
Balloon Works FIREFLY 8B-15 FIREFLY 8B · Accident: hard landing
From No airport to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN99LA023
- 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
Balloon Works FIREFLY 8B-15 FIREFLY 8B
- Aircraft type
- Balloon Works FIREFLY 8
- 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
- N3290G
- 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 · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot said that the surface wind velocity increased to 10 to 12 knots during the flight. He reported to the Investigator-In-Charge that he descended to lower altitudes several times to 'test the wind conditions.' He briefed his passengers and performed the landing. One passenger received a broken ankle. The injured passenger told one of the crew members that she had shifted her position just before touchdown and 'she had not braced herself properly for the hard landing.'
Probable cause
The passenger not following high wind landing procedures/directives which were given to her by the pilot. A factor was the unforecasted high wind condition.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN99LA023
- Event ID
- 20001211X11248
- Case number
- DEN99LA023
- 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: fc233c34afd00fe01b095453a22bd835611ad140156d1b36cca17b324a73d89e; retrieved 2026-09-21T11:19:49.147Z.