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June 6 - What was meant to be an evening of fun and entertainment was ruined for four visitors to Montecasino, after a freak hot air balloon accident.
But while the passengers in the balloon say that they were injured because of negligence on the part of the operators, the owners are adamant that it was not and that the passengers themselves are partly to blame for their own injuries.
The incident began when Michael Eilertsten and three other friends decided to take the Jozi Eye hot air balloon trip in Fourways last week.
"We were there at 7.45 and they had already started packing up," he recalled. "But the last trip is only at 8 pm. We insisted that we go on the balloon and the equipment was set up again."
Eilertsten claims that somebody forgot to detach one of the cables and that when the group was 50 m in the air, the basket in which they were standing started to tilt.
Attempts by the operator to contact ground staff were not successful and according to the passengers, they moved to the other end of the basket to try and tilt it.
At this point, their is a discrepancy to what happened next. Eilersten said that a cable broke and they started falling. He claims that it took 20 minutes before someone helped them.
However, a spokesman for the operators, Aerial Displays, said that the cable did not break and that a freak wind had the cable caught on the wall of the Palazzo Hotel. She also said that the passengers refused to cooperate and remain in the places they were told to remain.
"This incident is not the result of negligence," she said firmly.
Several people sustained physical injuries.
Thankfully, there are safer pastimes at Montecasino, considered Gauteng's best entertainment complex, including a fantastic casino and an exclusive poker suite.
Read our Montecasino review.
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