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samuel pierpiont langley builds a gasoline powered wersion of his tandom winged''Aerodromes.''
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Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, complete the first four sustained flights with a powered, controlled airplane at Kill Devil Hills, 4 miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. On their best flight of the day, Wilbur covers 852 feet over the ground in 59 seconds.
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Eugene Ely pilots a Curtiss biplane on the first flight to take off from a ship. In November he departs from the deck of a cruiser anchored in Hampton Roads, Virginia, and lands onshore. In January 1911 he takes off from shore and lands on a ship anchored off the coast of California.
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On May 21, Charles Lindbergh completes the first nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic, traveling 3,600 miles from New York to Paris in a Ryan monoplane named the Spirit of St. Louis. On June 29, Albert Hegenberger and Lester Maitland complete the first flight from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii. At 2,400 miles it is the longest open-sea flight to date.
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Jet engines designed independently by Britain’s Frank Whittle and Germany’s Hans von Ohain make their first test runs. (Seven years earlier, Whittle, a young Royal Air Force officer, filed a patent for a gas turbine engine to power an aircraft, but the Royal Air Ministry was not interested in developing the idea at the time.
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U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Charles "Chuck" Yeager becomes the fastest man alive when he pilots the Bell X-1 faster than sound for the first time on October 14 over the town of Victorville, California.
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Boeing makes the B-52 bomber. It has eight turbojet engines, intercontinental range, and a capacity of 500,000 pounds.
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Boeing conducts the first flight of a wide-body, turbofan-powered commercial airliner, the 747, one of the most successful aircraft ever produced.
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Northrop Grumman develops the B-2 bomber, with a "flying wing" design. Made of composite materials rather than metal, it cannot be detected by conventional radar. At about the same time, Lockheed designs the F-117 stealth fighter, also difficult to detect by radar.
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Boeing debuts the twin-engine 777, the biggest two-engine jet ever to fly and the first aircraft produced through computer-aided design and engineering. Only a nose mockup was actually built before the vehicle was assembled—and the assembly was only 0.03 mm out of alignment when a wing was attached.
