Four people died and a fifth was critically hurt after a hot air balloon crashed early on Sunday morning in a remote section of Arizona desert.
Micah Powell, mayor of the Pinal county town of Eloy near the crash site, said 13 people – eight skydivers, four passengers and a pilot – had been in the basket of the balloon. The skydivers had already jumped when the accident occurred.
A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) official said the balloon crashed after an unspecified problem with its envelope.
Witnesses told officials that the balloon went straight up and down before a hard impact, according to a local TV station. One person was pronounced dead at the scene, while three others died at a hospital. A fifth is in critical condition.
One victim was identified by family members as 28-year-old Indiana nurse Katie Bartrom. “She was a beautiful person, she recently became an RN and was making it on her own,” said her mom, Jennifer Hubartt.
Members of the area’s skydiving community told ABC15 that the pilot, Cornelius van der Walt, also died in the crash. The skydiver David Boone described Van der Walt as “an excellent balloon pilot. It’s not like he wasn’t experienced to dropping skydivers. He knew what he was doing.”
The crash is the deadliest since June 2021, when a balloon came down near Albuquerque, New Mexico, killing five. An NTSB accident report said that the pilot, Nicholas Meleski, did not maintain enough clearance from power lines while trying to land.
Investigators said the amounts of cocaine and marijuana found in Meleski’s system at the time suggested “recent use” that would have probably had “impairing effects” that contributed to the crash.
A year later, a balloon came down in Burlington, Wisconsin, seriously injuring three people. A report determined that the “probable cause(s) of the crash was the pilot’s selection of an inappropriate landing location and his failure to avoid an oncoming freight train, which resulted in the train colliding with and dragging the balloon.”
In another fatal incident, a Vermont balloonist had trouble finding a striker to relight the burner to re-inflate his balloon, causing it to hit the ground. In that 2021 crash, the pilot, Brian Boland, was thrown out of the basket, became trapped in a rope and was dangled under the balloon for a mile before falling to his death in a field.
• This article was amended on 16 January 2024. A reference in an earlier version to a balloon crash in “Burlington, Vermont” was corrected to Burlington, Wisconsin.
