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Atlas / NTSB / DIA68A0039

NTSB CAROL · Event

Event DIA68A0039

1968-03-21 MARLOW HEIGHTS, Maryland, United States Fatal 1 aircraft Status: Completed

Aircraft involved

Historical record (pre-1982)

NTSB recorded this accident in the pre-1982 coded-field schema — structured fields rather than free-text narrative. Decoded codes use established NTSB single-letter taxonomies; cause factors remain verbatim pending the Form 6120.4 codebook lookup.

Aircraft

HUGHES 300 · N9502F

Damage

Destroyed

Craft type

Balloon

Classification

Accident

Light condition

Dusk

Weather

VMC

Phase of flight

D4

Operator type

I

Kind of flying

DL

Weather at impact

Sky

CLEAR

Aircraft history

Total time

336 hrs

Pilot

Certificate

Commercial

Total hours

2,000

Age

35

Probable cause (from PRE1982.MDB)

PILOT-HOVERED OVER UNFAMILIAR AREA AT NIGHT.

Investigator remarks

INVESTIGATING SUSPECTED BANK ROBBERY.

Cause factors

  • 64/A/33 A
    PILOT IN COMMAND EXERCISED POOR JUDGMENT Cause — pilot/personnel action
  • 84/A/J A
    MISCELLANEOUS WRITTEN CAUSE Cause — pilot/personnel action
  • 83/A/I A
    TERRAIN HIGH OBSTRUCTIONS Cause — pilot/personnel action

Decoded against the NTSB Form 6120.4 cause-factor codebook (ct_Pre1982 table). Each row shows the raw triplet, modifier (Cause / Factor / etc.), category, and specific code.

Source: NTSB pre-1982 historical archive. Docket 3 1947. Source file NTSB_1968_3_1947.txt. Modern CAROL record on data.ntsb.gov ↗.

Related research

What the literature says.

Academic papers and agency reports matching this event's aircraft type. Sourced from NASA NTRS, NTSB Safety Studies, FAA CAMI, AOPA Air Safety Institute, Embry-Riddle Scholarly Commons, arXiv, and the Semantic Scholar academic graph.

Browse the full corpus — academia portal ↗