History of transport balloons filled with hot air were used in the first half of the 19th century and saw considerable action in several mid-century wars, most notably the American Civil War, where balloons provided observation during the Siege of Petersburg. Apart from some scattered reference in ancient and medieval records, resting on slender evidence and in need of interpretation, the earliest clearly verifiable human flight took place in Paris in 1783, when Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes went in a hot air balloon invented by the Montgolfier brothers. The Wright brothers made the first sustained, controlled and powered heavier-than-air
2012 Carterton hot air balloon crash 2012 Carterton hot air balloon crash On 7 January 2012, a scenic hot air balloon flight from Carterton, New Zealand, collided with a high-voltage power line while attempting to land, causing it to catch fire, disintegrate and crash just north of the town, killing all eleven people (ten passengers and the pilot) on board. An inquiry into the accident by the Transport Accident Investigation Commission (TAIC) concluded that the balloon pilot made an error of judgement when contact with the power lines became imminent, trying to out-climb the power lines rather than using the rapid descent system to drop the