Hot air balloon crashed |
The casualties included French, British, Chinese and Japanese nationals. No Americans are thought to be involved.
CNN reported that passengers inside the balloon included 19 foreign tourists: nine from Hong Kong; four from Japan; two from Belgium; two from Britain and two from France. CNN cited Luxor province Gov. Izzat Saad, who had previously been speaking on Nile TV.
"There were 20 passengers aboard. A surge happened and 19 passengers died. One tourist as well as the pilot survived," Ahmed Aboud, a spokesman for firms that operate balloon flights in your neighborhood, told Reuters news agency.
The Egyptian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity while he had not been authorized to go to the media, said there was a hearth and an explosion which this balloon mechanism then plunged in the sky and crashed into sugar cane fields west of Luxor on Tuesday. Luxor is all about 320 miles south of Cairo.
The site from the accident has seen accidents before. In 2009, 16 tourists were injured when their balloon stuck a cellphone transmission. 2009, seven tourists were injured in the similar crash.
In the statement carrying out a heat balloon accident last year in New Zealand that killed 11, Carl Holden, an air safety expert said, "People are actually flying hot air balloons safely, since 1783 to get exact, some time before the Wright Brother's first successful powered flight in 1903.
The air balloon may be the oldest successful human-carrying flight technology. Each year there are millions of hot air balloon flights all over the world without incident."
The Federal Aviation Administration regulates the application of heat balloons in the USA. According to a primary search in the National Transportation Safety Board's aviation accident database, there are 67 fatal incidents across America involving hot air balloons since 1964.