DFW08LA088 · Balloon Works Firefly 9
Balloon Works Firefly 9 · Accident: hard landing
From Taos, NM (no airport) to Questa, NM
Event
- NTSB case
- DFW08LA088
- 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
Balloon Works Firefly 9
- Aircraft type
- Balloon Works FIREFLY 9
- 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
- N72345
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Taos, NM (no airport)To Questa, NM
- 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
- Defining eventThe 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
- Destroyed
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The commercial pilot stated that he and the five passengers departed in his hot air balloon and drifted down a local gorge. The flight was normal until it was time to land. As the pilot descended to a large open grass field (where he has landed many times before), he told the passengers that they should bend their knees. When the balloon was about 20 feet agl, a large gust of wind caused the balloon to descend rapidly with a forward motion until it hit the ground. The impact was hard enough to eject four of the passengers and to break one of the burner can mounts, which caused it to point downward. The balloon then caught fire as it ascended approximately 30 feet high with the pilot and one of the passengers still onboard. The pilot said the he attempted to turn off the pilot light to the burner cans, but to no avail. He told the passenger not to jump, because the balloon was now starting to descend. The balloon then hit the ground again hard, and the pilot and the passenger were ejected. The balloon then bounced a few more times as it traveled north towards rising terrain where it became fully engulfed in flames and was incinerated. The pilot said that before the flight, he obtained weather information from the local airports and also released pilot balloons to determine wind direction. The winds were calm at the beginning of the flight and then "arced" toward the north-northwest while en route; however, he did not know the speed of the wind. Other wise, the weather as clear of clouds and unlimited visibility. The pilot stated that the balloon most likely encountered a roll cloud from the nearby ridge.
Probable cause
The balloon's encounter with a wind gust/downdraft during landing, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record DFW08LA088
- Event ID
- 20080403X00416
- Case number
- DFW08LA088
- Dataset
- full-current
- Source SHA-256
- 5cf380f0061817c0331a6b2d8cc7e0ee3a79bea469a1001dc5c10e56f35f5ab3
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: 7720dd8ff2ceeb886d9b654713fad28c25eb5ac956a3443a1af7186a600e4c7b; retrieved 2026-09-15T09:28:59.761Z.