CEN23LA293 · Aerostar International Inc RX 8
Aerostar International Inc RX 8 · Accident: hard landing
From Canandaigua Airport (KIUA) to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- CEN23LA293
- 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
- Event fatalities
- Unknown
- 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
Aerostar International Inc RX 8
- Aircraft type
- Aerostar RX-8
- 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
- N9184D
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Canandaigua Airport (KIUA), Canandaigua, NYTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 29 years (built 1994)
- 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
- None
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
Following an uneventful flight, the pilot descended the balloon at a steep angle into a field lined with trees. The pilot had briefed the passengers on the proper brace position before the flight and then again just before the landing. The basket touched down firmly, slid about 15 ft, and stopped upright. The passenger reported that the hard landing pushed her knee into the gas tank that she was standing next to. The passenger stated that after the first hard landing the balloon bounced again and then tipped over. Following the landing the passenger experienced pain in her leg. It was later determined the passenger had a broken left tibia. The pilot stated that there were no mechanical malfunctions with the balloon that would have precluded normal operations.
Probable cause
The pilot’s failure to maintain the proper descent rate during the balloon’s approach to landing, which resulted in a hard landing, the passenger’s leg hitting the gas tank, and serious injury.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record CEN23LA293
- Event ID
- 20230711192589
- Case number
- CEN23LA293
- 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, 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: 5bdce63110a28ce9580dfd40676716d86d69995f743a2ac336a384487d4be607; retrieved 2026-09-16T17:50:30.539Z.