“It does not appear at this time that there were any survivors of the crash”, Caldwell County sheriff Daniel Law said in a statement provided by his office.
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When a Xinhua correspondent arrived at the scene, where a heavy police presence could be seen, investigators from the FAA, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Department of Public Safety of Texas and the parties concerned were busy searching for evidence to handle the accident.
Heart of Texas Hot Air Balloon Rides is not accredited by the BBB and has a D+ rating. “I’d say it got as high up as those lower electric lines”.
Speaking just before leaving for Texas to lead the crash investigation, NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt said he was studying the board’s recommendations from previous hot air balloon accidents.
Russ Sargent said on Facebook the balloon was severed from the basket causing the balloon to shoot up into the air while the basket crashed to the ground. In February 2013, a balloon flying over Luxor, Egypt, caught fire and plunged 1000 feet to the ground, crashing into a sugar cane field and killing at least 19 foreign tourists.
Matt and Sunday Rowan had been married less than six months before their lives were cut short in this weekend’s hot air balloon crash that killed 16 people near Lockhart, Texas.
They’re not sure how many people were riding in the balloon and will look into whether the operator of the balloon filed a passenger manifest before taking off, also noting that balloons do not usually file flight plans, Sumwalt said. But the NTSB – which can recommend new regulations – has said more accidents would occur without more regulation. Lirette would not answer specific questions about the balloon’s launch or crash into a pasture Saturday morning near Lockhart, Texas.
Sixteen people were killed when a hot air balloon crashed in a fiery blaze on a rural field in central Texas, authorities told local media Saturday, one of the deadliest such accidents in history. This is the preliminary working theory, he said.
“And this will be a hard site for us to work through”.
The balloon company said in a recorded telephone message that chief pilot and owner Skip Nichols had died in the crash and all flights had been canceled. (Kin Man Hui/The San Antonio Express-News via AP) First responders and investigators appear at a scene of a balloon crash that reports indicate took the lives of 16 people near Maxwell, Texas in Caldwell County Saturday, July 30, 2016.
Gov. Greg Abbott and U.S. Sen.
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It is believed the balloon belongs to a tour group. “As always, Texans are strong in the face of adversity, and we all stand together in support of the families and entire Lockhart community as they respond to and begin to heal from this awful incident”. Balloon Federation of North America spokesman, Jeff Chatterton, declared that the hot air balloon disaster in Texas “was the deadliest on record in the Western Hemisphere”. “There were a number of fatalities”, he said.
