Wilbur and Orville Wright

Wilbur and Orville in Dayton 1909, from Dream of Flight

1892 - The Wright brothers opened a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio; they read about the glider experiments of Otto Lilienthal and his tragic death in an 1896 experiment.

1899 - Wilbur developed wing-warping to control a kite; built wind tunnels to test wing surface calculations published in 1901; corresponded with glider expert Octave Chanute who encouraged their experiments with gliders at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

1903 - Wilbur made the first powered flight of 120 feet in 12 seconds on December 17 at Kitty Hawk. 1906 - In Paris, Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont made the first significant powered flight in Europe. Romanian Trajan Vuia built and flew the first monoplane.

1907 - Paul Cornu piloted the first helicopter off the ground in Lisieux, France.

1911 - In a U.S. Army test in San Francisco, a live bomb was dropped from a plane for the first time.

1914 - The first scheduled passenger flight occured when an airboat hopped across Florida's Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg to Tampa.

1919 - A six-man American crew flew from Rockaway, New York, to Lisbon, Portugal, in 19 days, completing the first transatlantic flight.

1926 - In Auburn, MA, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket.

1927 - Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island, New York, to Le Bourget, near Paris, in the first solo transatlantic flight.

1929 - U.S. Army Air Corps Lt. James H. Doolittle completed the first instrument-guided takeoff, flight and landing, at Mitchel Field in New York.

1930 - Frank Whittle, British inventor, invented the jet engine.

1932 - Amelia Earhart flew a Lockheed Vega from Newfoundland to Ireland, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.

1933 - The first modern airliner, the ten-seat Boeing 247, made its maiden flight.

1933 - Wiley Post achieved the first solo circumnavigation of the world when he returned to Brooklyn, New York, after a seven-day journey.

1935 - The most successful airliner of its era, the McDonnell Douglas DC-3, took off. The military version was known as the C-47.

1939 - A jet-powered aircraft, the Heinkel He 178, was flown for the first time, in Marieneke, Germany. In the U. S., Igor Sikorsky on Sept.14, flew the first true single-rotor helicopter, the VS-300.

1942 - The German Air Force produced the first jet fighter, the Messerschmitt Me 262.

1942 - At Muroc Lake in California, test pilot Robert Stanley flew the first U.S. jet aircraft, the Bell XP-59A Airacomet.

1947 - West Virginia's Chuck Yeager was the first to fly faster than the speed of sound when he boomed above the California desert in a Bell X-1 at 662 mph.

1952 - The first scheduled jetliner service began with the flight from London to Johannesburg on a British De Havilland Comet.

1958 - The Boeing 707, the most successful passenger liner of the early jet age, entered commercial service with a flight from New York to Paris.

1964 - The SR-71 Blackbird, the world's fastest and highest-flying airplane and a U.S. Air Force spy plane, made its first flight.

1968 - The first supersonic passenger airliner to get off the ground was the Soviet Tupolev TU-144, beating the British-French Concorde by two months.

1969 - The first jumbo jet, the 452-passenger Boeing 747, made its first flight.

1976 - Streaking from Paris to Rio in 7.5 hours, the Concorde completed the first scheduled commercial supersonic flight.

1978 - The global positioning system (GPS), a network of navigation satellites managed by the U.S. Air Force, began operation.

1979 - A British cyclist pedalled the 70-pound Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel, then the longest flight by a human-powered plane.

1981 - The U.S. Air Force F-117A, the first radar-evading stealth fighter, debuted.

1988 - The heaviest plane ever built, the 1.3-million-pound six-engine Soviet Antonov An-225 transport, actually got off the ground.

1994 - The first flight of the U.S. military Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle began the era of pilotless military aviation.

1998 - The U.S. Air Force's latest eyes in the sky was tested in California; the Global Hawk reconnaisance jet cruised at 60,000 feet.

2000 - Airbus began production of the first superjumbo passenger jet, the A380, capable of seating as many as 820 people. Commercial service was planned for 2006

2003 - The Concorde made its last commerical flight in October,

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revised 2/20/07 by Schoenherr | reserve