Hot Air Balloons Trivia
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47 free Hot Air Balloons trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Oct 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 47 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What fuel do most modern hot air balloon burners burn?
Propane
Propane. It rides in the basket as a compressed liquid, and the burner runs it through a coil heated by its own flame so that it reaches the jets as gas and burns far more fiercely.
Q 02The Montgolfier brothers, who launched the first hot air balloons in 1783, ran which family business?
Paper-making
Paper-making. The family mills near Annonay paid for the experiments and supplied the material: the first big balloon was cloth lined with layers of paper.
Q 03Which American envoy watched the first manned balloon flight over Paris in 1783 and described it in his journal?
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin. Watching from the terrace of his house, he noted how the two aeronauts lowered their hats to salute the crowd as the balloon climbed.
Q 04King Louis XVI originally decreed that which group would be the first people to fly in a balloon?
Condemned criminals
Condemned criminals. A young science teacher and an army officer argued that the honour belonged to men of standing, won the king over and made the flight themselves.
Q 05A duck and a rooster shared the first passenger balloon flight in 1783 with which larger animal?
A sheep
A sheep. All three landed unharmed after eight minutes over Versailles, and Louis XVI rewarded the 'heroes of the air' with a home in his royal menagerie.
Q 06What did Joseph Montgolfier first think was the buoyant part of fire lifting his test boxes?
The smoke
The smoke. He believed fire gave off a special light gas, soon called Montgolfier gas, so the brothers burned wool and damp straw to make as much of it as they could.
Q 07What do crews use to part-fill a balloon on the ground before adding heat?
A powerful fan
A powerful fan. Cold air gives the envelope its shape first; only then does the crew aim the burner flame into the mouth to heat the air and stand the balloon upright.
Q 08What became of the first hydrogen balloon when it came down in the French countryside in 1783?
Villagers attacked it
Villagers attacked it. Terrified farmers at Gonesse, a few miles from Paris, set about the unmanned silk bag with pitchforks and knives until nothing useful was left.
Q 09What was Pilâtre de Rozier, the first balloon pilot, attempting when his craft crashed in June 1785?
Crossing the English Channel
Crossing the English Channel. His balloon caught fire about half an hour after leaving Boulogne, and he and his companion became the first people killed in an air crash.
Q 10At Fleurus in 1794 the French army first flew a balloon over a major battle, to do what?
Watch enemy movements
Watch enemy movements. Two officers hung over the field all day in the tethered l'Entreprenant, sending notes on the Austrian positions down to the generals below.
Q 11Which Three Kingdoms strategist is said to have used sky lanterns for military signalling?
Zhuge Liang
Zhuge Liang. Tradition says he sent up a lantern carrying a call for help when enemy troops had him surrounded, and China still calls sky lanterns Kongming lanterns after his courtesy name.
Q 12Which country's king saw the priest Bartolomeu de Gusmão demonstrate a small hot-air craft in 1709?
Portugal
Portugal. The Brazilian-born priest sent his unmanned model up before John V and the court in Lisbon, 74 years before the Montgolfiers' first public flight.
Q 13Julian Nott flew a 1975 balloon to test whether which ancient people might have flown over their desert drawings?
The Nazca
Q 21Which balloon made the first nonstop round-the-world flight in March 1999 with Piccard and Jones?
Breitling Orbiter 3
Breitling Orbiter 3. After several rival teams had tried and failed, its two pilots flew a pressurised cabin from the Swiss Alps all the way round to the Egyptian desert in just under 20 days.
Q 22What is a Rozière balloon, the type used for round-the-world flights?
A helium cell inside a hot-air envelope
A helium cell inside a hot-air envelope. The helium does the lifting and a little burner heat keeps it warm through the night, so the crew need not keep throwing out ballast or venting gas.
Q 23At Albuquerque's balloon fiesta, what is 'the Box' that pilots prize?
The Nazca. The idea was his fellow flier Jim Woodman's, and Nott, a sceptic at first, said the flight proved only that the ancients could have flown, not that they did.
Q 14Which American made the first free flight of a modern hot-air balloon in 1960?
Ed Yost
Ed Yost. He lifted off from Bruning, Nebraska, with a burner of his own design, and three years later proved the idea by flying a hot air balloon from England to France.
Q 15In which 1939 film does a self-confessed humbug float away alone in a hot air balloon?
The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz. In the original novel the wizard is a circus balloonist from Omaha whose craft first blew him to Oz, and it rises without Dorothy when she runs after Toto.
Q 16The envelopes of most modern hot air balloons are sewn from which fabric?
Nylon
Nylon. The exception is the mouth of the envelope, nearest the flame, which is made of or coated with a fire-resistant material so that the burner cannot set it alight.
Q 17Balloon pilots switch to a quieter 'whisper burner' when flying low over what?
Livestock
Livestock. The main burner's roar can panic animals, so pilots open a second valve that burns the fuel as a liquid: a weaker, yellower flame, but a far quieter one.
Q 18Which Indian tycoon set the hot air balloon altitude record of 21,027 metres in 2005?
Vijaypat Singhania
Vijaypat Singhania. The air is so thin at that height that the 67-year-old textile magnate rode in a sealed, pressurised cabin, slung beneath a balloon as tall as a 22-storey building.
Q 19Which airline founder co-piloted the first hot air balloons to cross both the Atlantic and the Pacific?
Richard Branson
Richard Branson. His Pacific flight with the Swedish balloon builder Per Lindstrand came down in Canada's far north, and the pair's 1998 attempt to circle the globe ended in the sea off Hawaii.
Q 20A 1991 balloon flight across the Pacific reached a record 245 mph by riding what?
The jet stream
The jet stream. These rivers of fast air several miles up are the only way a balloon can cross an ocean quickly, and this one carried its crew from Japan to Canada in about two days.
A looping wind pattern
A looping wind pattern. On a good October morning it carries balloons away from the launch field and then back again, so a pilot can land almost where the flight began.
Q 24Which adventurer made the first solo nonstop balloon flight around the world, in 2002?
Steve Fossett
Steve Fossett. After several failed attempts he took off alone from Western Australia in the Spirit of Freedom, circled the globe and came down in the Australian outback two weeks later.
Q 25Before launch, balloon crews often release a small helium 'pibal' to find out what?
The wind's direction
The wind's direction. Watching the little balloon climb shows where a big one would drift, and once the first balloons are up, the pilots still on the ground simply watch those instead.
Q 26Double Eagle II, the first balloon to cross the Atlantic in 1978, took off from which US state?
Maine
Maine. The three-man crew lifted off from the small town of Presque Isle in a helium balloon eleven storeys tall and came down six days later in a barley field near Paris.
Q 27In which US state is the world's largest balloon festival, held each October with over 500 balloons?
New Mexico
New Mexico. Albuquerque's fiesta has grown from a handful of balloons in a shopping-mall car park, and in 2005 the state made the hot air balloon its official state aircraft.
Q 28Albuquerque's first balloon fiesta, in 1972, celebrated whose 50th birthday?
A radio station
A radio station. KOB invited 21 balloons to its party; storms and cancellations left 13, which lifted off from a shopping-mall car park before a crowd of thousands.
Q 29What are the striped launch directors at the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta nicknamed?
Zebras
Zebras. Dressed in black-and-white stripes, they work the crowded field like traffic police, clearing each balloon for take-off so that hundreds can rise without colliding.
Q 30What is the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta's pre-sunrise launch with position lights called?
Dawn Patrol
Dawn Patrol. It began in 1978, when two California balloonists rigged lights that let them fly in the dark, and pilots still on the ground watch them to judge the morning's winds.