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There’s only so much you can do to control where a hot air balloon ends up after you take to the skies. Two people who hopped into one in Texas learned that the hard way after it got stuck near the top of a radio tower, and they thankfully emerged unscathed with the help of the firefighters who mounted a harrowing rescue operation.
What is widely recognized as the first successful manned flight in the history of human aviation took place 120 years before the Wright Brothers ushered in a new era of travel with the airplane they successfully tested in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903.
A hot air balloon was the craft that Étienne Montgolfier climbed aboard in Paris on October 15, 1783 before rising around 80 feet in the air while it was tethered to the ground.
That set the stage for the untethered journey that two of his associates conducted the following month as Louis XVI looked on, and they successfully traveled around five-and-a-half miles while rising as high as 3,000 feet during their historic flight.
One of those passengers, Pilâtre de Rozier, also became one of the first recorded fatalities in the history of modern aviation when he and another man died in a crash while unsuccessfully attempting to cross the English Channel in a hot air balloon in 1785.
That was one of the first of many incidents that highlight the potential pitfalls of that particular form of transportation, and we’ve been treated to our latest entry in the canon thanks to what transpired in Texas over the weekend.
Two people in Texas were rescued from a hot air balloon after getting stuck in a radio tower 900 feet above the ground
Hot air balloons are statistically a pretty safe method of travel. Only 30 fatalities were recorded between 2008 and 2022, and one study that took a look at injuries that were sustained during a flight noted the vast majority of them stemmed from hard landings as opposed to mishaps in the skies.
With that said, there are plenty of things that can go wrong when you’re soaring through the air when you consider there’s only so much you can do to control the balloons that are largely at the mercy of the elements, and a sizeable chunk of incidents that occur during flight involve balloons that strike trees, power lines, and other objects that rise from the ground.
According to The Associated Press, that was the case with the scary situation that unfolded in Longview, Texas on Saturday morning after firefighters were dispatched to a radio tower where a hot air balloon had gotten stuck more then 900 feet in the air.
Footage captured the operation that involved more than a dozen of those first responders making their way up the tower before reaching the two people in the balloon’s basket, who were given the ropes and harnesses that were used to exfiltrate them before embarking on a descent that took around two hours.
The unidentified occupants were taken to the hospital as a precautionary measure, but it appears they were unharmed aside from the potential psychological damage that comes with enduring that kind of ordeal. It’s not entirely clear what led to the balloon getting stuck in the first place, but the FAA says it plans to investigate the matter.