CHI07CA300 · Cameron Balloons O-77
Cameron Balloons O-77 · Accident: hard landing
From Creston, IA to Creston, IA
Event
- NTSB case
- CHI07CA300
- 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
Cameron Balloons O-77
- Aircraft type
- Cameron O-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
- N9539G
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Creston, IATo Creston, IA
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Pilot in command › Flight into adverse weather, inadvertent
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
During a high-wind landing the balloon landed hard, the pilot was ejected from the basket, and the passenger pulled the envelope deflation line. The balloon came to rest against a barbed-wire fence. The passenger was seriously injured with a broken arm and the balloon's envelope was substantially damaged with several fabric tears and punctures. The accident flight was part of an organized balloon launch in conjunction with a balloon festival. At 0630, the pilot attended a prelaunch pilot meeting that included a weather briefing. At the time of that briefing the surface wind velocity was 4 knots. The surface wind velocity was forecasted to increase to approximately 10 knots by 1000 local time. Upon departure the encountered wind was greater than forecasted. As soon as it was practicable, the pilot performed a high-wind landing to an open hayfield at which time the hard landing was encountered. At 0819, a nearby weather station reported the surface wind was from the south-southeast at 4 knots, gusting to 20 knots. During the subsequent accident investigation, a wind model estimated the wind direction and velocity at approximately 700 feet agl to be from the south at 18 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's inadvertent flight into adverse (high wind) weather conditions, which resulted in a hard landing. Contributing to the accident was the high wind encountered during the balloon flight and the barbed-wire fence.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CHI07CA300
- Event ID
- 20071023X01638
- Case number
- CHI07CA300
- 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. 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: 995646a4afa130e09344f79137ab0e574f874b1e16b74a89bcb2626ac46515e6; retrieved 2026-09-21T08:44:05.761Z.