CEN14LA005 · Cameron N105
Cameron N105 · Accident: hard landing
From Albuquerque, NM to Albuquerque, NM
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN14LA005
- 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 N105
- Aircraft type
- Cameron N105
- 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
- N4113T
- Operator
- Taylor-Christensen Tim
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Albuquerque, NMTo Albuquerque, NM
- Aircraft age
- About 17 years (built 1996)
- 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
- None
Cause areas
- Personnel issues › Action/decision
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 took off with several other balloons as part of that day's Dawn Patrol flight at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Throughout the flight, the pilot changed altitude several times to find an average wind between 18 and 26 mph. The sun was coming up, and the pilot saw other Dawn Patrol pilots starting to land. As he descended to near-treetop level for his landing approach to a golf course, the balloon experienced a false heavy condition (when descending into a faster moving air mass or wind shear, the air flow over the balloon pulls the balloon down) in which the balloon descended sooner than the pilot wanted. He applied the burners to avoid a house and power lines. As the balloon came back down, the pilot saw that the wind was about 22 mph. The pilot and the two passengers got down in the basket in preparation for the high-wind landing. About 20 feet above the ground, the pilot shut off the burners, pulled open the vent, and the balloon hit the ground flat and square. The basket tipped over and dragged about 25 feet before stopping. About 13 minutes before the accident the weather conditions at the nearest aviation weather station included wind from 360 degrees at 9 knots.
Probable cause
The pilot's decision to land the balloon from a high approach altitude due to high winds, which resulted in a hard landing.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN14LA005
- Event ID
- 20131009X55406
- Case number
- CEN14LA005
- 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, 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: 8e490cc4bb6cc69ac71c942549379b16b0bbc37ace3df675d1b7b2be336170ee; retrieved 2026-09-15T22:56:50.327Z.