1861: Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, American inventor and balloonist, makes a balloon trip from Cincinnati, Ohio to the South Carolina coast in 9 hours.

1935: The first passengers leave for Australia on a new Imperial Airways/QANTAS service; the first Australian departures were made from Brisbane on April 17.

1959: Aeroflot puts the 84 to 110-seater Ilyushin IL-18, its first turboprop, into service from Moscow to Alma Ata, Kazakhstan, and Adler, now Sochi, on the Black Sea.

1978: A Korean Air Lines Flight 902, a 707, was hit by a missile fired from a Soviet Sukhoi Su-15 interceptor after it had entered Soviet airspace. This caused a rapid decompression of the fuselage which killed two passengers. The 707 made an emergency landing on a frozen lake near Murmansk, USSR.

1998: An Air France flight from Bogotá's El Dorado Airport, to Quito, using an aircraft leased from TAME and flown by Ecuadorian crew, crashed into a mountain near Bogotá. All 43 passengers and 10 crew died.

2012: A Boeing 737-200 operated by Karachi-based Bhoja Air, a Pakistani domestic carrier, crashed into a small village near Islamabad, with nine crew members and 118 passengers onboard. Total casualties are 127.