DFW07CA079 · Buckeye Breeze XL
Buckeye Breeze XL · Accident: in flight encounter with weather on approach
From Mountain Home, AR to Buffalo City, AR
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW07CA079
- 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
Buckeye Breeze XL
- Aircraft type
- Buckeye BREEZE XL
- Category
- Powered Parachute
- 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
- N582W
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Mountain Home, ARTo Buffalo City, AR
- 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
- Approach
- 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 encounter with weather
- DamageDestroyed: beyond practical repair. Substantial: damage that affects the structure, performance or handling and normally needs major repair. Minor: less than that. Glossary
- Destroyed
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
The 72-hour sport pilot initiated a descent to an open field where he intended to perform a touch and go landing on his registered powered parachute. The pilot, who reported having accumulated a total of 4 hours in the same make and model was seriously injured. The 15-statute mile flight was planned as a flight of two Rotax 582 powered parachutes. The pilot stated in the Pilot/Operator Aircraft Accident Report (NTSB Form 6120.1) that he had "no memory of the flight;" however, a witness who was flying the other powered parachute, stated that the accident pilot was flying approximately 100 feet above the ground while maneuvering to land, when "he encountered severe turbulence causing the powered parachute to go into a tight spiral." The parachute impacted the ground at a high rate of descent, which was described to be "approximately 40 miles per hour descent rate." The weather at the nearest weather reporting station located approximately 9 miles to the northwest of the accident site, reported the wind from the east-northeast at 6 miles per hour, clear skies, visibility 10 statute miles, and a barometric pressure setting of 29.93 inches of Mercury.
Probable cause
The pilot's failure to maintain control of the aircraft during approach. A contributing factor was the reported encounter with severe turbulence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW07CA079
- Event ID
- 20070418X00432
- Case number
- DFW07CA079
- Dataset
- historical-pre2008
- Source SHA-256
- 89e2df6d848e7ab3b42e7d7c7a03ff403303057a26ca04c95b3ea67201c3ce74
Source notes (5)
- 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: 1323cde859808e7605bdd193726ed642d63ff07c24ebfae0bdc4f762c0fb78fe; retrieved 2026-09-21T08:50:52.359Z.
- Corrected after a review of the NTSB narrative and the aircraft's make and model, which establish these values: aircraft category. The narrative states the pilot was flying "his registered powered parachute" (Buckeye Breeze XL); the NTSB Pre2008 MDB codes it PLFT (Powered-Lift).