CEN12LA591 · Arbc Inc DBA Lindstrand 180A
Gentle Breezes Balloon Rides Arbc Inc DBA Lindstrand 180A · Accident: hard landing
From Sauk-Prairie Airport (91C) to Sauk-Prairie Airport (91C)
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN12LA591
- 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
Arbc Inc DBA Lindstrand 180A
- Aircraft type
- Lindstrand 180
- 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
- N3013T
- Operator
- Gentle Breezes Balloon Rides
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Sauk-Prairie Airport (91C), Sauk Prairie, WITo Sauk-Prairie Airport (91C), Sauk Prairie, WI
- 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
- 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
- Minor
Cause areas
- Environmental issues › Conditions/weather/phenomena
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates as recorded by the NTSB; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
Before the flight, the pilot obtained a proper weather briefing, and the wind for the area of the flight was forecast to be about 7 knots and decreasing during the flight. The pilot stated that the wind was initially out of the east about 6 knots, but during the flight it had increased to about 15 knots. The pilot said that after 1 hour and 45 minutes of flight he encountered wind shear. He attempted to descend and maneuver the balloon to seek lower wind, but the terrain was "hilly," which presented problems for landing due to wind "rotors" that could deform the balloon's envelope. According to the pilot, as the balloon moved toward a nearby airport, where he hoped to land, a wind shear pushed the balloon's envelope in. The pilot briefed the passengers before landing; however, the balloon's gondola hit tree tops during the descent and began to tip. The pilot then shut off the burners and opened the balloon's envelope vents to rapidly deflate the balloon, which would minimize the gondola being dragged after landing. During the landing, one of the passengers sustained a serious leg injury.
Although the wind at the accident site could not be determined, one of the passengers reported that his hand-held GPS device indicated a ground speed of 15 mph just before touchdown. Landing in higher wind conditions in a balloon typically results in the gondola tipping over and dragging as the envelope deflates and is pulled by the wind.
Probable cause
The pilot's loss of control of the balloon during a landing in higher-than-expected wind conditions, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN12LA591
- Event ID
- 20120830X15049
- Case number
- CEN12LA591
- 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: local date, investigation status. Values present in the bulk record are kept.
- The date is the local date; the NTSB stores the UTC date 2012-08-04.
- API snapshot SHA-256: ec8fee0cfb74848c50f1f3d9493400c953324d2859df9b2685f35c4518099963; retrieved 2026-09-15T19:35:34.458Z.