‘Shoot it down!’: The tragic tale of two American balloonists over Belarus
It was the fourth day of the 1995 Gordon Bennett Cup, one of the world’s most prestigious balloon races and one of the most challenging as well. Alan Fraenckel, 55,…
This was the Union Army’s air force during the Civil War
If you thought that air warfare was reserved for a time after airplanes were invented, you thought wrong. During the American Civil War, the Union troops used hot air balloons to spy on Confederate troops.
The idea to use balloons was the brai…