First air-to-air kill in history

[Finkeren]

You probably thought the first air-to-air combat with deadly result took place during the opening phases of WW1, right?

 

WRONG! It actually happened over a century earlier, during the time of (but completely unrelated to) the Napoleonic Wars:

 

http://www.oddlyhistorical.com/2014/08/22/aerial-aggression-the-odd-story-paris-balloon-duel-1808/

 

It is a story made of pure gentlemanly awesomeness.

[PatCartier]

Funny, thanks for sharing.

A lot of things in english about this duel on the web but nothing in french !

[AndyJWest]

...

A lot of things in english about this duel on the web but nothing in french !

 

If that is correct (I'm in no position to check, given how little of my schoolboy French I can remember) one might wonder whether this is a bit of journalistic fiction. It does seem rather implausible.

[Monostripezebra]

[Finkeren]

If that is correct (I'm in no position to check, given how little of my schoolboy French I can remember) one might wonder whether this is a bit of journalistic fiction. It does seem rather implausible.

It all seems to lead back to the same British newspaper article, so you might be right. It isn't the only reported case of balloon duelling though, there is one from Portugal in 1876 as well.

 

I don't know if it sounds all that implausible though. Ballooning was becoming a popular sport at the time, and since a free-floating balloon is extremely stable, if would offer an excellent platform for shooting.

 

My main reason to think, that it might not have happened is, that such a novelty would have been more widely reported. In 1808 there was a bit of a lull in the fighting during the Napoleonic Wars, but you'd think that contact between Britain and France was still limited and romours might fly wild and make it possible for such a story to be made up out of wholecloth.

 

Still, it's a funny story and to me not entirely implausible.

[AndyJWest]

I'm sure that in reasonable conditions it would be possible to hit one balloon from another with a blunderbuss at 80 yards. What I'm less convinced of however is that this would result in a hole which would cause such a rapid loss of buoyancy that the occupants would be killed. At that range, wouldn't it be more likely to just result in a series of small holes, and a gentle descent?

 

There are other questions too. For a start, what were the seconds doing in the balloon baskets? A second's role in a duel is to assist a duellist before (and hopefully after) the actual event, and not to act as another potential victim, and I can't imagine anyone thinking that blunderbusses were going to be accurate enough to pick off a single target in a balloon basket. I'm also a little suspicious about the detailed account of events seemingly given by spectators 900 yards below. Though waiting that long before opening fire seems a little implausible too, given that they were inevitably going to drift apart as they climbed.

 

So for the above reasons it seems unlikely to me. Not impossible, certainly, but needing a little more evidence than a single foreign newspaper report.

 

P.S. It's a pity that Mythbusters is no longer on the air. I'm sure that Adam and Jamie would have enjoyed trying this out...

 

P.P.S. I'm not alone in my scepticism: a couple of comments on the page providing the source article

(http://blog.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/2012/08/24/the-first-duel-fought-in-hot-air-balloons-paris-1808/)

 

Ulrich Elkmann

February 26, 2013 at 10:41 am

Sorry, folk, to spoil a good story – but looking into l’affaire in French – “la mort dans l’air – duelle sur les toits de Paris” etc., comes up with a total blank about the incident or the names of the folk involved. Zilch. Nada. The French journals would not have missed such a salacious story, even 200 years ago, nor the littérateurs like Stendhal, Balzac. Dumas would have turned it into a rousing swashbuckler. It does not feature in ANY history of ballooning…Seems that British journalists liked to invent good stories even back then. Or, as they say in English: Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

 

M. L'infiable

October 13, 2013 at 4:30 am

Something about the names (Mr. First Prize and Mr. (fit of) Pique fight for the honour of Ms. Shoot-Fast) makes me skeptical of this story.

Edited May 31, 2017 by AndyJWest

[Finkeren]

LoL the last comment is gold!

 

Yeah, it's probably fake news, as the Annoying Orange would say.

[Finkeren]

If it happened, the details such as weaponry, altitude and distance are almost certainly made up to lend the story some credence. There would have been just about no chance of estimating these accurately.

 

However, I think it is fairly feasible to imagine downing a balloon with a blunderbuss, though probably not at 80 yards.