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
1989 Alice Springs hot air balloon crash 1989 Alice Springs hot air balloon crash On 13 August 1989, two hot air balloons collided near Alice Springs, Northern Territory, Australia, causing one to crash to the ground, killing thirteen people. It was the world's deadliest ever ballooning disaster until February 2013, when a balloon accident near Luxor, Egypt killed 19 people. , it remains the deadliest ever ballooning accident in Australia, and the third-deadliest worldwide, surpassed only by the Egypt crash and a balloon accident in Texas in 2016 that left 16 people dead. The flight took off at Santa Teresa Road, 29 kilometres south east of Alice