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On This Day: 2004

Aviation events for 2004

January 3: Flash Airlines Flight 604, a 737-300 (reg SU-ZCF) en route to Paris via Cairo, crashes shortly after takeoff from Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, killing 148. American NTSB investigators blame the crash on spatial disorientation by poorly trained pilots, while Egyptian authorities cite mechanical failure. Read more...
 
January 4: The NASA Mars Rover Spirit, lands successfully on Mars.
 
January 13: An Uzbekistan Airways plane crashes in Uzbekistan's capital of Tashkent, killing all 37 aboard.
 
January 21: NASA’s Mars Exploration Robot-A (MER-A) Spirit ceases communication from the red-planet because of a flash memory issue. The problem would be fixed two days later remotely from Earth.
 
January 25: NASA’s Opportunity rover lands on Mars.
 
February 12: Exactly four years and one day after the launch of JetBlue, United Airlines responds to its low cost competitors with Ted.
 
March 5: First flight of the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer.
 
March 25: Air Holland ceases operations.
 
March 27: NASA's X-43 pilotless plane breaks world speed record for an atmospheric engine by briefly flying at 7,700 kilometers (4,780 miles) per hour (seven times the speed of sound).
 
April 1: AirBridge Cargo Airlines commences operations.
 
April 4: Alaska Airlines discontinues service between San Francisco and Tucson.
 
May 4: Air France and KLM merge.
 
May 4: US Airways becomes the 15th member of the airline coalition Star Alliance.
 
May 5: Air France and Netherlands-based KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) merge, the two airlines are now known as Air France-KLM.
 
May 6: An Air Cush Let 410UVP (9XR-EF) stalls on takeoff in Jiech, Sudan, due to an imbalance after a shift in its cargo load. The plane is sent crashing into the ground, killing 6 of the 10 occupants.
 
May 9: Southwest Airlines begins service to Philadelphia International Airport.
 
May 12: The last F-4 Phantom fighters are withdrawn from service with the Israeli Air Force.
 
May 23: Frontier Airlines begins service to Philadelphia, Billings, Montana and Spokane, Washington.
 
May 27: Delta Air Lines begins service between Cincinnati and New Haven.
 
June 1: America West Airlines starts service between Phoenix and Anchorage.
 
June 6: Alaska Airlines starts service between Denver and Anchorage and discontinues service between San Jose and Tucson.
 
June 21: SpaceShipOne is the first non-government built spacecraft to transport a person into space and return safely to earth.
 
August 24: In separate incidents, Volga-AviaExpress Flight 1303, a Tupolev TU-134A (RA-65080), and Siberia Airlines Flight 1047 (RA-85556), a Tupolev TU-154B, both explode while in flight south of Moscow. The Russian government blames Chechen suicide bombers for the disasters, which kill a total of 89 people on both aircraft.
 
September 8: The unmanned NASA spacecraft Genesis crashes when its parachute fails to deploy, destroying some of the solar wind samples it was carrying back to earth.
 
October 4: Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne makes its third successful flight into space, thus clinching the $10 million Ansari X Prize.
 
December 9: United Airlines begins flights to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam from San Francisco via Honk Kong. This was the first flight since Pan Am ended service in 1975.
 
December 10: The US Federal Aviation Administration issues an Emergency Airworthiness Directive effectively grounding all U.S. Beechcraft T-34 Mentor aircraft. The directive is in response to fatal in-flight structural failure accidents during simulated aerial combat flights.---Two of Canada’s Snowbirds aerobatic CT-114 Tutors collide near Mossbank, Saskatchewan during training, killing one of the pilots. In a sad coincidence, this is six years to the date of the team’s previous fatal accident.
 
 
 

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