[6] The record time for the winner of the event is held by Germans Wilhelm Eimers and Bernd Landsmann who remained airborne for over 92 hours in the 1995 race,[7] taking off from Switzerland and landing four days later in Latvia.

The distance record is held by the Belgian duo of Bob Berben and Benoît Siméons who, in 2005, piloted their balloon 3,400 kilometers (2,100 mi) from Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, to Squatec, Quebec, Canada.

Ben Abruzzo and Maxie Anderson secured victory piloting Double Eagle III 987 kilometers (613 mi) in 47 hours from California to Colorado.

[5] The following year, the winning team of Jerry Tepper and Corky Myers floated 862 kilometers (536 mi) from the takeoff point in California.

[6] Heinsheimer went on to arrange further contests in the United States which were still reported in the national press as being the "Gordon Bennett Balloon Race" or similar.

Instead the balloon hit a fence just after takeoff, lost two ballast bags, ascended rapidly and ripped open three minutes into the race.

[19][20] The winners of the 1910 Gordon Bennett Cup, Alan R. Hawley and Augustus Post, set a distance and duration record of 1,173 miles (1,888 km) in 44 hours and 25 minutes,[21] but the pair of experienced balloonists landed in a remote section of Canadian wilderness in Quebec.

After a week passed with no word from the team, search parties were formed by the Aero Club of America, but many newspapers reported that the men were likely dead.

Among the dead were Lieutenants John W. Choptaw and Robert S. Olmsted who were killed when their balloon "US Army S6" crashed in Loosbroek, Netherlands.

[23][24][25] Sixty years later, in 1983, Americans Maxie Anderson and Don Ida were killed as the gondola detached from their balloon during an attempt to avoid crossing into East German airspace.

[29] On September 29, 2010, the 2004 trophy-winning American team of Richard Abruzzo and Carol Rymer Davis went missing in thunderstorms over the Adriatic Sea.