FTW03LA004 · Air Tractor AT-400
Air Tractor AT-400 · Accident: in flight collision with terrain/water while maneuvering
From Marmaduke, AR to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- FTW03LA004
- 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
- Unknown
- 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
Air Tractor AT-400
- Aircraft type
- Air Tractor AT-400
- Category
- Airplane
- 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
- N155HF
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Marmaduke, ARTo 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 137: Agricultural
- 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
- Maneuvering · aerial application
- 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
- In flight collision with terrain/water
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Aircraft control, not maintained
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During the aerial application flight, two fields were being sprayed from east to the west with a set of power lines running north and south between the fields. The pilot would fly the airplane over the power lines and then descend to spray the field. During the accident swath descent to spray the east field, the airplane struck the ground. The pilot and local authorities reported that the winds were "strong" from the southwest. The weather observation facility, located approximately 22 nautical miles southwest of the accident site, reported the wind from 250 degrees at 4 knots, visibility 10 statute miles, few clouds at 4,000 feet agl and a broken ceiling at 5,500 feet agl, temperature 31 degrees Celsius, dew point 22 degrees Celsius, an altimeter setting of 30.01 inches of Mercury, and towering cumulus clouds in all quadrants.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain aircraft control. A contributing factor was the towering cumulus in all quadrants.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record FTW03LA004
- Event ID
- 20021004X05282
- Case number
- FTW03LA004
- 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, coordinates. 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: b5597135d52b413d7b024f6326f4bd4da0113db5d6d203e53ceb7f718840c522; retrieved 2026-09-21T19:36:14.390Z.