DEN06CA108 · Firefly Balloons Galaxy 11B
Firefly Balloons Galaxy 11B · Accident: hard landing en route
From Rio Rancho, NM (no airport) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- DEN06CA108
- 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
Firefly Balloons Galaxy 11B
- Aircraft type
- Firefly GALAXY 11
- 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
- N2190S
- Operator
- David E. Smith · private individual
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Rio Rancho, NM (no airport)To 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
- En route · 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
- Hard landing
- Also codedOther events the NTSB coded in the sequence, such as a wire strike after a loss of power. Flight Findings uses them for its kinds of event. Glossary
- Fuel exhaustion
- 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
- Fluid, fuel › Exhaustion
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The pilot reported that they had been aloft for about 45 minutes. The wind had shifted several times and he decided to land in an open field. There were power lines that bordered the field. The pilot ascended to clear the power lines but the wind shifted again and carried the balloon toward trees and the Rio Grande. The pilot vented the balloon "less than 30 feet above the ground and did a steep end landing in less than 3 knots. The balloon came down with low impact, bounced once, about 3 feet and came to a stop upright." Passengers, however, told an FAA inspector that the pilot attempted to slow the descent by activating one burner of a two-burner system. He tried lighting the burner with a striker, but it would not stay lit due to insufficient fuel. The balloon landed hard and bounced. One passenger, who was holding on to a strap, fractured her arm when she struck it with her head.
Probable cause
fuel exhaustion, resulting in the pilot's inability to relight one of two burners, and resulting in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DEN06CA108
- Event ID
- 20060817X01208
- Case number
- DEN06CA108
- 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, 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: c3225d5cb5bd87ae52b55ef3585010c5acf76428be276cb0bf6b9bd9bac6f3ed; retrieved 2026-09-21T08:55:05.585Z.