1897 – Birth of Victor Maslin Yeates, British World War I flying ace and author; he was best known for his semi-autobiographical book “Winged Victory.”
1911 – Cromwell Dixon, flying a Curtiss Model D “Pusher,” becomes the first aviator to cross the Continental Divide, from Helena, Mont., to Blossburg, some 15 miles to the west, through Mullan Pass in 26 minutes; he was 19.
1949 – The Berlin Airlift officially ends; the U.S. delivered 1,783,573 tons, while the Royal Air Force 541,937 tons, totaling 2,326,406 tons, nearly two-thirds of which was coal, on 278,228 flights to Berlin. The Royal Australian Air Force delivered 7,968 tons of freight and 6,964 passengers during 2,062 sorties. The Douglas C-47s and C-54s together flew more than 92 million miles in the process, the distance from Earth to the Sun. At the height of the airlift, one plane reached West Berlin every thirty seconds.
1964 – First flight of the Piper PA-31 Navajo, an American six- to eight-seat twin engine aircraft; almost 4,000 are built before production ends 20 years later.
1982 – Americans H. Ross Perot Jr. and Jay Coburn lands back in Dallas, Texas, with a Bell 206L-2 “Spirit of Texas” (shown above), to complete the first round-the-world helicopter flight; the feat took 29 days and 3 hours.
1997 – Death of Nobuo Fujita, an Imperial Japanese Navy pilot who flew a Yokosuka E14Y “Glen” floatplane from the long-range submarine aircraft carrier I-25 to conduct the only wartime aircraft-dropped bombing on the continental U.S.
