3 Hot Air Balloons in Wyoming Crash Into Ground

For 45 minutes, Clinton Phillips and his family soared in a hot-air balloon Monday morning, high above Jackson Hole, a bucolic mountain valley in Wyoming that is popular with tourists.

“This is the greatest thing we’ve ever done as a family,” he recalled thinking. Then, a strong gust of wind threw Phillips’ balloon out of control. “I looked past my wife and I just screamed, ‘Brace for impact!’ ” he said.

After that impact, when they rolled out of the balloon, Phillips said everyone in his family was limping; his son thought he’d had a concussion, and his wife’s ribs were broken.

The balloon carrying Phillips and 20 others was one of three hot air balloons owned by the same company to crash Monday morning about the same time, officials said.

The precise number of people injured was unclear. The local sheriff’s office said “multiple victims” were transported to hospitals for treatment. Phillips said his family and others decided not to wait for ambulances and took themselves to local hospitals. At least one victim was flown to a hospital in Idaho Falls, according to The Associated Press.

The president of the balloon company said that they were carrying 38 passengers total.

Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crashes, according to Sheriff Matt Carr of Teton County.

Allen Kenitzer, a spokesman for the FAA said “each balloon landed hard under unknown circumstances in Teton Village” shortly before 8 a.m. Messages left for the NTSB were not immediately returned.

The three balloons crashed across an area that was approximately one-third of a mile, the sheriff said in a statement.

“I was dragged, slamming into the ground four times, for 200 yards,” said Phillips. “You didn’t know when it was going to stop.”

In an interview Monday night, the president of Wyoming Balloon Company, the tour company that owns the balloons, said that they made “high-wind landings” in response to a sudden wind gust.

The forecast had called for clear conditions and “light winds,” said the company president, Andrew Breffeilh. The wind gusts were “outside the forecast,” he said.

“High-wind landings happen every day,” Breffeilh said.

“Every high-wind landing looks like a crash,” he added. “It skids and bounces.”

But Monday’s landings were more severe, he said. The winds were so strong that “it took us 300 feet to stop after I opened up the valve” in the balloon, he said. “That’s a pretty long drag.”

“Considering the conditions we were in, there could have been worse results in winds that strong,” he said.

One of Phillips’ daughters fainted, he said. Another daughter, who because of a previous incident can use only one of her arms, managed to stay inside the balloon only because she was squashed under fellow passengers.

Phillips’ son had to push against the ground as they were skidding to keep himself in the balloon.

“His arm could have been ripped off,” Phillips said. “If anyone had fallen out, I think they would have been killed, because the cage is so hard and heavy, it would have crushed you.”

In the interview, Breffeilh initially declined to characterize what happened Monday as a “crash.” Later, he said, “You can call it what you want. People were injured.”

Typically landings are so smooth “you may not feel the touchdown,” Breffeilh said.

He said his company had never had a crash in 31 years of operating. The passengers Monday, he said, “were all scared.”

“The most important thing is to get them down as quickly and safely as possible,” Breffeilh said.

It was not clear when balloons from the company would lift off again. Breffeilh said he was “considering a stand-down for some period of time in order to learn from what happened today” and to cooperate with federal investigations.