1903: The 1st fully practical airship, the Lebaudy, makes a successful flight in Paris, France. The 190-foot-long airship flies 38 ½ miles and achieves a speed of 25-mph.

1906: Alberto Santos-Dumont flies some 720 feet and wins the Aéro-Club de France prize for exceeding 100 meters.

1912: The 1st successful catapult launch of a seaplane is made at the Washington, D.C. Navy Yard. Catapulted by a compressed air system from an anchored barge, the floatplane is a Curtiss A-1.

1919: Keith and Ross Smith set out to fly a Vickers Vimy, registered G-EAOU, from England to Australia, the first flight between these two places. They arrive in Darwin on December 18.

1921: The 1st air-to-air refueling is made when American Wesley May steps from the wing of one aircraft to that of another carrying a five-gallon can of gasoline strapped to his back.

1952: First flight of the Tupolev Tu-95 (NATO:Bear).

1980: Voyager 1 makes its closest approach to Saturn, flying 77,000 miles above its surface and taking photo of its rings.

1980: Delta Air Lines orders 60 Boeing 757-200s, the largest single order at the time for a single airliner type.

1981: Space Shuttle Columbia performs mission STS-2, the first time that a manned, reusable aircraft returned back into space.

1984: Space Shuttle astronauts snare a satellite, the first ever “space salvage.”

1989: California Polytechnic State University flies the first human-powered helicopter.

1996: The Charkhi Dadri mid-air collision, between Saudi Arabian Airlines Flight 763 (a 747-100 registered HZ-AIH) and Kazakhstan Airlines Flight 1907 (an IL-76 registered UN-76435), kills a total of 349 people, making it the deadliest mid-air collision in aviation history. The Kazakh aircraft was cleared to descend to 15,000ft, but leveled off at 14,500ft instead, into the path of the departing Saudi airliner. The IL-76’s tail sliced off the 747’s wing, making the Boeing spiral towards the ground, reaching 705mph at impact. The IL-76 remained somewhat stable but still crashed in a field, with 4 passengers surviving for a short while before succumbing to their injuries.

2001: American Airlines Flight 587, an Airbus A300 crashed in the Belle Harbor neighborhood of New York City due to separation of the vertical stabilizer. All 260 people aboard the jetliner and 5 people on the ground were killed.

2003: First commercial flight for Etihad Airways.

2013: Global Aviation Holdings, Inc., the largest commercial provider of charter air services to the US Military and a major provider of worldwide commercial global passenger and cargo air transportation services, announced that the Company and its subsidiaries, including its two operating airlines World Airways and North American Airlines, have filed voluntary petitions for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware.