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First airplane flight by the Wright Brothers
Two brothers from Dayton, Ohio, named Wilbur and Orville Wright, were successful in flying an airplane they built. Their powered aircraft flew for 12 seconds above the sand dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina -
Charles Lindbergh completes his solo transatlantic flight
Charles A. Lindbergh completed the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight in history, flying his Spirit of St. Louis from Long Island, New York, to Paris, France -
Frank Whittle invents the jet engine
Hans von Ohan of Germany was the designer of the first operational jet engine, though credit for the invention of the jet engine went to Great Britain's Frank Whittle. Whittle, who registered a patent for the turbojet engine in 1930 -
A modern airliner, Boeing 247, flew for the first time.
The first Boeing 247 made its initial flight on February 8, 1933, and the plane's performance confirmed the wisdom of what had been to that date a daring gamble on the part of Boeing's management -
Germany's Heinkel 178 is the first fully jet-propelled aircraft to fly.
a German Heinkel He 178 that made the first jet flight on Aug. 27, 1939. Even though World War II accelerated the growth of the airplane, the jet aircraft was not introduced into service until 1944, -
Charles E. Yeager pilots Bell X-1—the first aircraft to exceed the speed of sound in level flight
On Oct. 14, 1947, Capt. Charles E. Yeager in the Bell X-1 rocket-propelled experimental aircraft was the first man to exceed the speed of sound in level flight, crossing with little trouble an invisible threshold. -
the Concorde
Aérospatiale and the British Aircraft Corporation unite to develop the Concorde, the first and only supersonic civilian aircraft. -
The first nonstop, round-the-world
The first nonstop, round-the-world flight by solar and battery-powered airplane is completed. Airbus releases the A380 double-decker civilian passenger jet.