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
2016 Lockhart hot air balloon crash owner died in the accident, announced that it would be suspending operations. More than two years later on September 27, 2018, the House of Representatives approved new legislation that would mandate medical exams for commercial balloon pilots. 2016 Lockhart hot air balloon crash On July 30, 2016, sixteen people were killed when the hot air balloon they were riding in struck power lines, crashed and caught fire in the unincorporated community of Maxwell, near Lockhart, Texas, south of the state capital Austin. It is the deadliest ballooning disaster to ever occur in the United States. The aircraft involved was a