One day when I was surfing a bit, I found a very interesting item on the web-pages of the International Aeronautical Federation (FAI - Fédération Aéronautique Internationale).

More specific, there were some statistics that could be found in the reports from the Ballooning Commission (CIA - Commission d'Aérostation Internationale).

This statistics showed, among other things the numbers of pilots and balloons in each country.  If you want to see these statistics, follow this link , they are interesting.  But come back, because I've added some more features.

What I thought when I saw the country with the most pilots and balloons (the U.S.A.), was that it's a big country, with a giant population.  In our country (Belgium) there are not that much pilots and balloons because it's much smaller.  I wanted to know how the numbers looked when compared with the population in each country.

So I made a plan : I started with finding the population in each country.  That was easy, on the internet it's not so difficult to find this.  I used the numbers from that other CIA : the Central Intelligence Agency.   They have published 'The World Factbook'.  Here I easily found what I was looking for.

Having all the numbers I wanted, I did some calculations, using Microsoft Excel.

And here are some of the results.  I made some different calculations.  The results can be found on the following separate pages :

On each page you can find a chart with the 15 best scoring countries for that item, together with a personal interpretation or appreciation.   If you have comments or additions, please let me know.  I consider adding a page with comments, but therefore, I need comments.  So let me know what you think about this, you can reach me in many ways, you can find all these ways on my Feedback page.

If you want to check the results, you can have a look at the table I made.