Lee Pibworth and Allan Burnett died on New Year's Day
A combination of factors, including possible inexperience, may have caused a New Year’s Day hot air balloon crash which killed the pilot and his passenger, an accident report.
Pilot Lee Pibworth, 42, and passenger Allan Burnett, 55, both from Bristol, died when the Cameron 0-120 balloon crashed onto a bowling green at Midsomer Norton, Somerset, after reaching 21,500ft.
Neither was wearing a parachute as the balloon descended at a rate of about 5,500ft per minute, the report by the Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) said.
After the crash, an “intense post-impact fire ensued”.
The report said a consultant aviation pathologist had concluded that Mr Pibworth was killed on impact and that Mr Burnett, while severely injured, died in the fire.
In the flight from a launch site at Chelwood, near Bristol, on the morning of January 1 this year, Mr Pibworth had been attempting to achieve a flight to an altitude of more than 19,700ft – one of the elements for award of the British Balloon and Airship Club (BBAC) gold badge.
Before the flight, the two men were seen to don their oxygen system and test it.
During the balloon’s ascent, the rate of climb exceeded the 1,000ft per minute specified in the flight manual, the AAIB said.
The report said the ground crew had heard from Mr Burnett that they were at 21,780ft and were starting their descent. The AAIB went on: “Nothing further was heard from the balloon by the ground crew or air traffic control. There was no sign of stress in the voices of the balloon occupants during any of the transmissions.”
The balloon descended for about 80 seconds at a rate of about 1,500ft a minute.
“It then entered a rapid descent of approximately 5,500ft per minute from which it did not recover,” the report said.
The balloon had a “lock top” landing deflation system which is a modified parachute valve fitted to larger balloon envelopes.
The report concluded: “There was no evidence of a technical defect in the balloon or of an in-flight structural failure.
“It is likely that the accident occurred as a result of some combination of a mishandled parachute valve inexperience of lock tops, inexperience with a large balloon at high rates of ascent, degraded human performance due to some level of hypoxia and pressure to descend as the approved flight level (of 21,000ft) was about to be breached.”
The report said that hypoxia – a lack of oxygen in the blood and ultimately the brain – can lead, at heights of 15,000ft to 20,000ft, to deteriorating performance, with loss of critical judgment.
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