Hot air balloon crashes and kills four including nurse in Arizona | US News

A hot air balloon crashed in the desert in Arizona, killing four people including the pilot and a nurse and critically injuring another.

The balloon dropped around 7.50am on Sunday about five miles north of the small rural town of Eloy. The gondola held 13 people including eight skydivers, four passengers and the pilot, Mayor Micah Powell said.

All the skydivers left the gondola before the balloon went up and down and made a hard crash landing, said witnesses, according to ABC 15.

A victim was pronounced dead at the scene and three others were rushed to a hospital where they died. One person remains in critical condition at a Valley hospital.

One victim has been identified by her family as Katie Bartrom, 28, a registered nurse from Indiana who loved going skydiving and on adventures.

‘It’s kind of somber here at home. We’re crying about her on and off and talking about her on and off still trying to make it real,’ her mother, Jennifer Hubartt, told the TV station.

Bartrom had traveled to Arizona with some friends and ‘was really enjoying the experience and having fun and seeing a new place that she had never seen before’, Hubartt said.

‘She was a beautiful person, she recently became an RN and was making it on her own,’ the mother said.

The pilot has been identified as Cornelius van der Walt by his friends in the skydiving community.

Skydiver David Boone said the crash was a ‘shock’ to him because van der Walt was ‘an excellent balloon pilot’ and ‘always super careful’.

‘He’s very, very aware of what he’s doing. He’s been doing it for a long, long time and he only got better with time. He was just an excellent balloon pilot,’ Boone told ABC 15.

‘It’s not like he wasn’t experienced to dropping skydivers. There’s definitely (a) different way to do it. So he knew what he was doing.’

The cause of the crash has not yet been determined and is being investigated by local police, the National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration.

‘While we continue our efforts, we ask for your thoughts and support for the families and loved ones affected during this difficult time,’ the Elroy Police Department wrote on Facebook on Sunday afternoon.

Eloy is about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix and about 50 miles northwest of Tucson.

The Eloy crash happened nearly two-and-a-half years after a hot air balloon hit power lines in Albuquerque and the gondola struck the ground, killing five people. Other fatal hot air balloon crashes happened in Teotihuacan, Mexico, in April 2023 and in Luxor, Egypt, in June 2022.

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

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