Louis Blériot of 1909. Like some of the other prizes offered by the paper, it was widely seen as nothing more than a way to gain cheap publicity: the Paris newspaper "Le Matin" commenting that there was no chance of the prize being won. The English Channel had been crossed by an unmanned hydrogen balloon in 1784 and a manned crossing by Jean-Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries followed in 1785. Blériot, who intended to fly across the Channel in his Type XI monoplane, had three rivals for the prize, the most serious being Hubert Latham, a French national of English extraction flying
2012 Ljubljana Marshes hot air balloon crash 2012 Ljubljana Marshes hot air balloon crash The 2012 Ljubljana hot air balloon crash occurred on the Ljubljana Marshes in central Slovenia on 23 August 2012, killing six people while 26 others survived. A hot air balloon carrying 32 passengers, mostly tourists, crashed and caught fire during a thunderstorm on the Ljubljana Marshes, in the Municipality of Ig, between Lavrica, Črna Vas and Ig, next to Ig Street (), two hundred meters from the turn for Matena, seven kilometres south of Ljubljana. A sudden weather change caused the pilot to try to land immediately. However, the emergency landing was thwarted