ROCHESTER — As far as conclusions go, an investigation by the federal National Transportation Safety Board into a hot air balloon accident in Rochester that happened earlier this year doesn’t stray too far from what millions of people observed in the video that went viral.
The NTSB report released last week concludes in a succinct one-sentence statement that the probable cause of the accident was pilot Michael Lesmeister’s “failure to maintain clearance from power lines while landing in a field.”
An NTSB investigator did not travel to the accident site. A disclaimer notes that the purpose of its investigations is not to “assign fault or blame for an accident.”
Lesmeister was cleared to pilot again three weeks after the…
