Today In History: Great Ball of Fire.

On this date in 1930, the British commercial airship R101 augered into a ridge line in France and burst into the kind of fireball that can only be created by a few jillion cubic feet of hydrogen and thousands of liters of diesel fuel.

Intensive investigation into the causes of the accident revealed that the main culprit was that a balloon full of hydrogen and diesel fuel had been launched into the air, and what followed was pretty much the inevitable result.