ERA21LA290 · Cameron 0-105
Cameron 0-105 · Accident: hard landing
From Post Mills Airport (2B9) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- ERA21LA290
- 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
- 1 · all aircraft and ground
- Ground fatalities
- 0
- 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 0-105
- Aircraft type
- Cameron 0
- 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
- N2925L
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Post Mills Airport (2B9), Post Mills, VTTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 37 years (built 1984)
- 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
- Substantial
Cause areas
- Aircraft › Aircraft oper/perf/capability
- Personnel issues › Task performance
Approximate · Coordinates from the NTSB case API, which marks them as estimated or does not say; no uncertainty radius is established.
NTSB narrative
The balloon departed with the pilot and four passengers for a commercial sightseeing flight. About 45 minutes into the flight, the burner’s pilot light extinguished. The pilot told the passengers that he had to switch propane tanks; however, he could not locate the striker to relight the burner. The balloon started to descend while the pilot searched the balloon basket for the striker, and several minutes later, he located a backup striker. The balloon had descended close to the ground by the time the pilot re-lit the pilot light, and he could not get the balloon to climb before impacting a field. One passenger and the pilot were thrown from the basket upon impact. The balloon then started to rise, and the pilot’s foot was trapped between the balloon attach rope and the basket frame. The pilot untangled his foot but remained hanging below the basket for about 1 mile before falling to a field and suffering fatal injuries. The remaining passengers contacted ground support personnel via a handheld radio and received instructions on how to operate the balloon controls in preparation for landing. The balloon traveled about another 3.5 miles before landing in trees. Examination of the balloon did not reveal any preimpact anomalies that would have precluded normal operation. Had the pilot been able to relight the burner in a timely manner, it was likely that he would have been able to sufficiently arrest the balloon’s descent rate to prevent the hard landing.
Probable cause
The balloon pilot’s delay in relighting the burner, which resulted in a hard landing and his ejection from the balloon.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record ERA21LA290
- Event ID
- 20210716103490
- Case number
- ERA21LA290
- 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, cause areas. 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: 46847040588f82bd922c732345b6c15456256a0ff1d74c1f4243fe78a5209756; retrieved 2026-09-15T07:31:46.199Z.