WPR24LA029 · Aerostar International Inc RX 8
Aerostar International Inc RX 8 · Accident during landing
From Page City Park, AZ to an unrecorded destination
Event
- NTSB case
- WPR24LA029
- 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
- N50466
- Operator
- Unknown
- Onboard fatalities
- Unknown
- Route
- From Page City Park, AZTo not recorded
- Aircraft age
- About 20 years (built 2003)
- 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
- Unknown or undetermined
- 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
- Aircraft › Aircraft power plant
- 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 pilot of the balloon reported that while selecting an alternate landing area, both burners failed to ignite. The pilot unsuccessfully attempted to restart both burners with the piezo igniters. The pilot then took out a butane lighter to manually relight a pilot light, but he still could not relight it in time to arrest the balloon’s descent. The pilot informed the passengers that they were going to hit the ground hard. The basket hit a parked car, tilted downward momentarily, and then bounced off the road. After the basket contacted the ground and climbed 6 to 10 feet above ground level, one of the passengers fell out of the balloon and sustained a serious injury. With one fewer passenger, the balloon began to ascend. During that time, the pilot found one of the blast valves operative. No further malfunctions were observed for the duration of the flight. A functional test and burner examination was completed with no defects noted that would have precluded normal operation.
Probable cause
A hard landing after both burner pilot lights extinguished during the landing approach for undetermined reasons. Contributing to the accident was the pilot's inability to relight the burner pilot lights.
Verbatim NTSB analysis and probable cause from the NTSB dataset
Sources
NTSB record WPR24LA029
- Event ID
- 20231108193360
- Case number
- WPR24LA029
- 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: 2b5984c051cdf1bf54da16e540bc9fc69109ef0decd943d9e025602d74a56320; retrieved 2026-09-16T18:16:50.885Z.