On This Day in Aviation History

On This Day in Aviation History

1909 – British Army Aeroplane No. 1 (1A replica shown), with builder Samuel Franklin Cody at the controls, makes a sustained flight of more than an hour around Laffan’s Plain (Farnborough), travelling about 46 miles in 1 hour, 3 minutes; it is the first recorded cross-country flight in the UK.

1912 – Birth of James Lincoln Holt Peck, American flying ace during the Spanish Civil War, one of the few African-American aviators in the Spanish Republican Air Force, aviation journalist and the first African-American to serve at at NASA’s Cape Canaveral in an engineering capacity.

1939 – Five French Air Force Curtiss Hawk 75 fighters engage a squadron of German Messerschmitt Bf 109s and shoot down two. They are the first French air-to-air victories of World War II, as well as the first by any of the Western Allies.

1987 – Death of Gordon M. Gollob, World War II German fighter pilot and flying ace, first pilot in aviation history to claim 150 aerial victories.

2004 – First flight of the Boeing AH-6 Unmanned Little Bird (ULB) demonstrator, an American light helicopter gunship built from a civilian MD 530F and developed by Boeing Rotorcraft Systems.

2012 – A Russian Army Mil Mi-35 crashes into a mountain in bad weather near North Cuacauss republic of Dagestan, all four aboard the helicopter are killed.

Updated: September 8, 2015 — 1:52 AM
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