Deadliest ever balloon accident?

A couple of years ago, I took a flight at dawn in a hot air balloon over Cappadocia in Turkey.  It was an unforgettably beautiful and thrilling experience, but you were always conscious that you were being kept in the air only by a roaring flame just above your head.

Unfortunately, something went horribly wrong on a flight 1,000 feet over Luxor in Egypt this morning, when a balloon caught fire, exploded and fell to the ground, killing up to 19 tourists.   Two people are thought to have survived what may have been the deadliest balloon accident ever.

An eyewitness in another balloon reported seeing people jump out of the stricken craft.  There are suggestions that it may have hit an overhead power line. 

In 2009, another balloon came down over Luxor after hitting a communications tower, but accidents are mercifully rare.  Until today, the deadliest ever was probably the mid-air collision over Alice Springs in Australia in 1989 which brought one balloon to earth with the loss of 13 lives.

Egyptian train crashes

A collision between two passenger trains in Egypt has killed at least twenty people. The accident happened when one train stopped after hitting a water buffalo about 30 miles south of Cairo, and a second ploughed into the back of it.

Egyptian railways have suffered a number of serious accidents over the last few years. Last year, more than 35 people died when a train collided with a number of vehicles on a level crossing about 270 miles north-west of Cairo. A truck had failed to stop and pushed the other vehicles onto the crossing, while in 2006, the death toll was at least 58, when a commuter train collided with another that had stopped just outside a station at Qalyoub, 12 miles from the capital.

Egypt’s worst rail accident ever, though, happened in February 2002, when fire broke out aboard a service from Cairo to Luxor about 40 miles into its journey. Unaware of what had happened, the driver sped on, fanning the flames as he went.

Witnesses saw people throwing themselves from the carriages, and soon the tracks were lined with dead and injured. An opposition newspaper, complaining of poor safety standards, said the government should find out who was responsible and “hang them in public squares”. For the story, see A Disastrous History of the World.