1863 – Birth of Henry Ford, American industrialist, founder of the Ford Motor Co., and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production; he also designed the famous Ford Trimotor.
1918 – American pilot Walter Carl Simon and Scottish observer William Watson Smith score five kills with their Royal Flying Corps Bristol F.2b biplane on a single mission during World War I.
1935 – U.S. Navy Lt. Frank Akers becomes the first person to make a blind landing at sea. His Berliner-Joyce OJ-2 biplane has a hooded cockpit allowing him to see only his controls and instruments as he lands on the U.S.S. Langley.
1959 – First flight of the Northrop N-156F (shown above), a U.S. light supersonic fighter aircraft and the prototype of the Northrop F-5A Freedom Fighter.
1970 – Operation Rimon 20 begins; in an aerial battle between the Israeli Air Force against Soviet fighter pilots stationed in Egypt during the War of Attrition, five Soviet-flown Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-21s are downed by Israeli McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantoms and Dassault Mirage IIIs.
2001 – Death of Ennio “Banana” Tarantola, a Spanish War and World War II Italian flying ace.
