1896 – Birth of Grigory Eduardovich Suk, Russian World War I flying ace.
1917 – Canadian World War I flying ace William Wendell Rogers shoots down a Gotha G bomber piloted by German Blue Max order of merit winner Hauptmann Rudolf Kleine, killing Kleine and his three crew members.
1937 – While anchored upstream from Nanking, the U.S.S. Panay and three Standard Oil tankers came under attack from Japanese naval aircraft; the Panay, a U.S. Navy gunboat, is sunk but the Japanese claim it was an accident.
1946 – First flight of the Westland Wyvern (S.Mk.4 shown), a British single-seat, carrier-based, multi-role strike aircraft; it is powered by large and distinctive contra-rotating propellers.
1968 – Pan Am Flight 217, the Boeing 707 “Clipper Malay,” crashes into the sea and explodes on impact, killing all 51 on board; it is thought the pilots were disoriented by an optical illusion created by the lights of Caracas, Venezuela, on an upslope while approaching the city at night.
1994 – Death of Stuart Allen Roosa, U.S. Air Force pilot and NASA astronaut; he was one of only 24 people to travel to the Moon.