1893 – Birth of Cosimo Rizzotto, Italian World War I flying ace.
1918 – Death of Edward Carter Eaton, Canadian World War I flying ace, killed in action in his Sopwith Camel.
1946 – The U.S. Army Air Force and the U.S. Navy adopt the “knot” and “nautical mile” as standard aeronautical units for speed and distance. A nautical mile is about six feet and the knot equals one nautical mile per hour.
1954 – First flight of the BAC Jet Provost (originally built by Hunting Percival), a British jet-powered trainer.
1994 – An Air Ivoire Fokker F-27 Friendship 400M crashes short of Abidjan-Felix Houphouet Boigny Airport, Ivory Coast, with flaps and undercarriage still retracted; all 17 aboard perish.
2003 – The NASA Helios prototype (shown) breaks up and falls into the Pacific Ocean about ten miles west of the Kauai, Hawaii, during a remotely piloted systems checkout flight in preparation for an endurance test scheduled for the following month.
