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50 free Hot Air Balloons trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Hot air balloons trivia for pub-quiz setters, festival-goers and anyone who has watched a mass ascension and wondered how any of it works. The questions run from the 1783 flights of the Montgolfier brothers - the sheep, duck and rooster at Versailles, the king who wanted to send up criminals, the physics teacher who became the first person to fly and the first to die in an aircraft - through the balloon at the Battle of Fleurus, Sophie Blanchard's fireworks, and the first Channel and Atlantic crossings. The modern half covers Ed Yost's propane burner and Raven Industries, the Bristol Belle and Cameron Balloons, the altitude, speed and round-the-world records of Vijaypat Singhania, Per Lindstrand, Bertrand Piccard, Steve Fossett and Fedor Konyukhov, plus the Albuquerque and Bristol fiestas and Cappadocia. There are also plain how-it-works questions: envelopes and gores, parachute vents, variometers, why flights launch at dawn, how pilots steer with no rudder and why the basket is still wicker. About a third of the questions are easy enough for kids and the rest go progressively harder. Every answer was checked against a reference page, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What fuel do most modern hot air balloon burners burn?
Propane
It is stored as a liquid in pressure vessels much like forklift cylinders; each burner can produce 2 to 3 megawatts of heat.
Q 02In which Ardèche town did the paper-making Montgolfier brothers develop and first demonstrate their balloon?
Annonay
Joseph got the idea watching laundry billow upward as it dried over a fire; he ran his first experiments while living in Avignon.
Q 03Who made the first untethered manned hot air balloon flight in Paris on 21 November 1783 with the Marquis d'Arlandes?
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier
The 25-minute flight from the Château de la Muette covered about nine kilometres, and he had to douse embers scorching the fabric with a sponge and his coat.
Q 04King Louis XVI originally decreed that which group would be the first people to fly in a balloon?
Condemned criminals
De Rozier and d'Arlandes petitioned, with help from the Duchess de Polignac, for the honour to go to men of higher status.
Q 05Which three animals flew at Versailles on 19 September 1783, in the first balloon flight with living passengers?
A sheep, a duck and a rooster
The sheep, named Montauciel ('Climb-to-the-sky'), stood in for human physiology while the birds were controls; all landed safely after eight minutes.
Q 06What did Joseph Montgolfier first think was the buoyant part of fire lifting his test boxes?
The smoke
He called the supposed special gas 'Montgolfier Gas' and so preferred smouldering fuel like wet straw and wool.
Q 07How long did the Montgolfiers' first public demonstration flight, on June 4, 1783, last?
10 minutes
The unmanned sackcloth-and-paper globe, held together by 1,800 buttons, covered two kilometres.
Q 08Which wallpaper maker decorated the Montgolfiers' 1783 balloons with zodiac signs and the king's face?
Jean-Baptiste Réveillon
Étienne Montgolfier's own first tethered lift-off took place in the yard of the Réveillon workshop, most likely on October 15, 1783.
Q 09What was the first hot air balloonist attempting when he died in June 1785, aviation's first crash death?
Attempting to cross the English Channel
His hybrid gas-plus-hot-air design, the Rozière balloon, is the type used two centuries later for round-the-world flights.
Q 10At which 1794 battle did the French make the first military use of a balloon, l'Entreprenant?
Fleurus
An aeronauts' corps had been created in the French army that April, but making hydrogen in the field proved a logistical headache.
Q 11Which Three Kingdoms strategist is said to have used sky lanterns for military signalling?
Zhuge Liang
The Mongols later used these 'Kongming lanterns' at the Battle of Legnica in 1241, the first known ballooning in the Western world.
Q 12Which Portuguese Jesuit demonstrated the unmanned Passarola aerial device before King John V in 1709?
Bartolomeu de Gusmão
Some claim he invented the hot air balloon 74 years before the Montgolfiers, a view not generally accepted outside Portuguese-speaking countries.
Q 13Julian Nott flew a 1975 balloon to test whether which ancient people might have flown over their desert drawings?
The Nazca
Q 21What ground speed did the Virgin Pacific Flyer record in 1991, the fastest ever for a manned balloon?
245 mph
The balloon was designed to ride the trans-oceanic jet streams.
Q 22Which balloon made the first nonstop round-the-world flight in March 1999 with Piccard and Jones?
Breitling Orbiter 3
It left Château-d'Oex, Switzerland on March 1 and landed in the Egyptian desert after 19 days, 21 hours and 55 minutes.
Q 23What is a Rozière balloon, the hybrid type used for round-the-world flights?
A helium cell inside a hot-air envelope
He claimed to have used only materials and methods available to pre-Inca Peruvians a thousand years ago.
Q 14Which American made the first free flight of a modern burner-equipped hot-air balloon in 1960?
Ed Yost
He took off from Bruning, Nebraska, on October 22, 1960 and stayed up for 1 hour 35 minutes; he also designed the classic teardrop envelope shape.
Q 15Which Sioux Falls company, co-founded by the modern hot air balloon's inventor, sold the first civilian one in 1961?
Raven Industries
Its Vulcoon S50A was the first hot air balloon to receive an FAA airworthiness certificate.
Q 16What was the key engineering insight, in the 1950s, that made the modern hot air balloon practical?
It could carry its own fuel and burner
Under the Montgolfier system the air was heated by a ground fire before release, so the balloon could only sink once launched.
Q 17What was the name of the first modern hot air balloon built in the United Kingdom, in 1967?
Bristol Belle
Bristol remains the world centre of the industry and hosts one of Europe's largest balloon fiestas every August.
Q 18Which company, based in Bristol, England, is the world's largest manufacturer of hot air balloons?
Cameron
It also owns Lindstrand Balloons of Oswestry and absorbed Thunder and Colt; Spain's Ultramagic is second-largest.
Q 19Who set the hot air balloon altitude record of 21,027 metres in 2005, taking off from Mumbai?
Vijaypat Singhania
The Indian textile magnate, chairman of the Raymond Group, landed 240 km south in Panchale; the previous record was Per Lindstrand's 19,811 m in 1988.
Q 20In 1991 Lindstrand and Branson flew the Virgin Pacific Flyer 7,672 km from Japan to which country?
Canada
Riding the jet stream, its 74,000 cubic metre envelope was the largest ever built for a hot air craft.
The hot air heats the helium at night so it does not contract; hydrogen was tried in the 1780s and quickly abandoned as too dangerous.
Q 24How many burners did the balloon that first flew nonstop around the world in 1999 carry?
Six
The crew added four extra fuel containers before launch, and needed them; the gondola is now at the Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington.
Q 25Which adventurer first flew solo nonstop around the world in a balloon, in 2002 on his sixth attempt?
Steve Fossett
He launched Spirit of Freedom from Northam, Western Australia and returned 13 days later; in 1995 he had also made the first solo balloon crossing of the Pacific.
Q 26Which Russian adventurer flew solo around the world in a balloon in a record 268 hours in 2016?
Fedor Konyukhov
His time beat the 2002 solo record of 320 hours 33 minutes.
Q 27Double Eagle II, the first balloon to cross the Atlantic in 1978, took off from which US state?
Maine
Ben Abruzzo, Maxie Anderson and Larry Newman landed in a barley field at Miserey near Paris after 137 hours; souvenir hunters stole most of their logs.
Q 28In which US state is the world's largest balloon festival, held each October with over 500 balloons?
New Mexico
The Albuquerque fiesta began in April 1972 with just 13 balloons in a shopping-mall parking lot as part of a radio station's 50th birthday.
Q 29How many balloons took part in the first Albuquerque balloon fiesta in 1972?
13
Radio station KOB had asked to use Sid Cutter's balloon for its 50th birthday, then tried to beat the record gathering of 19 balloons set in England.
Q 30What are the striped launch directors at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta nicknamed?
Zebras
They act as traffic cops so hundreds of balloons can leave the field in two safe waves starting around 7 am.