CHI00LA196 · Aerostar S-77A
Aerostar S-77A · Accident: hard landing
From Stillwater, MN to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI00LA196
- 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 S-77A
- Aircraft type
- Aerostar S-77
- 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
- N5075H
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Stillwater, MNTo 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
- Weather condition › Unfavorable wind
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Three of the nine occupants of the hot air balloon received serious injuries during landing. The pilot said that, during the flight he experienced wind velocities higher than had been reported. He said that he advised and briefed the passengers of the possibility of a high wind landing. He said that during the approach to landing, the wind was approximately 6 to 8 miles per hour and that, just before touchdown, the wind increased to 12 to 15 miles per hour. Passengers reported that the pilot advised them of the possibility of a hard landing. They reported that the pilot briefed them on how to prepare for the landing. One of the witnesses reported that the balloon impacted the ground twice and came to rest on its side. A weather report for a station located about 20 miles west-northwest of the accident site was reporting winds from 320 degrees magnetic at 10 nautical miles per hour.
Probable cause
the unfavorable wind condition for landing and control of the balloon during landing not possible by the pilot.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI00LA196
- Event ID
- 20001212X21388
- Case number
- CHI00LA196
- 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: local date, investigation status, damage. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2000-07-14.
- API snapshot SHA-256: 3b1de07101f5d0aa6d6949ba06482a8c2a7b39fe871bbee4ea214419a8d7fccd; retrieved 2026-09-21T10:33:59.368Z.