1913: Briton Gustav Hamel lands after a non-stop flight of 4 hours and 18 minutes from Dover, England, to Cologne, Germany in a Blériot XI.

1920: The Venezuelan Air Force is formed.

1926: Western Air Express starts its service between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City.

1944: Howard Hughes and TWA president Jack Frye fly a Lockheed Constellation from Burbank to Washington, DC, setting a transcontinental speed record of 6 hours 57 minutes.

1961: Cuban exiles using B-26 Invaders begin the campaign to free Cuba from Fidel Castro. Read more...

1964: Jerrie Mock becomes the first female pilto to successfully circumnavigate the globe, landing her Cessna 280 in Columbus, Ohio, after 29 days of flying covering 22,860 miles.

1967: An SR-71 made the longest Mach 3 flight in history. The flight was over 14,000 miles.Pilot Robert L. Stephens (the Silver Fox), RSO Kenneth D. Hurley.

1967: Surveyor 3 - USA Lunar Soft Lander launched. Landed on the lunar surface.

1970: A Sikorsky CH-53D helicopter flies between London and Paris to demonstrate that modern helicopters can provide reliable inter-city services.

1970: The crippled Apollo 13 spacecraft and its four astronauts returns to earth safely after suffering an explosion enroute to the moon.

1973: Federal Express begins operations, using a fleet of 14 Dassault Falcon 20 jets to ferry parcels from 25 cities to their Memphis hub for the nightly sort and subsequent distribution across the country. The sort has gone on every night since, with the company growing becoming critical to the backbone of the world economy, and the fleet growing to over 700 aircraft flying to about 325 destinations.

2012: A Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, accompanied by a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) T-38 Talon chase plane, carries the retired Space Shuttle Discovery from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, to Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, where Discovery is slated to replace the Space Shuttle Enterprise on display at the Smithsonian Institution's nearby Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center, a part of the National Air and Space Museum. The delivery flight includes low-level passes over the Cape Canaveral area as well as flybys at an altitude of 1,500 feet (457 meters) over Washington, D.C.-area landmarks.