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.
