(Cairo) Hot air balloon flights over the pharaonic sites of Luxor, in Egypt’s tourist south, resumed on Wednesday after a two-day suspension caused by an accident, authorities said.
Posted at 6:23 a.m.
On Monday, the collision of two hot air balloons had caused two minor injuries. Immediately, the Civil Aviation Authority dispatched a team of investigators to Luxor, 500 km south of Cairo.
It finally decided to no longer suspend only the two operators of the hot air balloons involved in the accident, while “hot air balloon flights can resume in Luxor” after the investigators “examined the flight procedures and ensured the measures of security,” she said in a statement.
In 2013, also in Luxor, 19 tourists died in the explosion of a hot air balloon, then in 2018, a tourist died in another balloon accident.
Egypt, caught between inflation and devaluation, relies heavily on its tourism, which is just beginning to recover from ten years of political turmoil, since the “revolution” which toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and the pandemic of COVID-19.
The summer season this year has already been bereaved by the death of two tourists, an Austrian and a Romanian, killed by a shark near Hurghada on the Red Sea, which welcomes 65% of tourists visiting the country.