Warbirds Online » Blog Archive » This Week In Military/Aviation History: 22

Hello Folks, Wait a minute, what are you doing here? No, that can’t be right, I’m here, so you have to be there, right? Bottom Line: everybody has to be somewhere and we’re all together, so we must all be here then, or are we all there? Suddenly, I’m not all there. I’m giving myself a headache. So how was your week? Fast, slow, the usual seven, more or less? The weather has been even more confusing lately. The weatherman has said we were having August weather, and then September weather, and the last time I looked at my calendar, it was the end of October. Oh, ready for Halloween? If you look behind the plastic Christmas trees and decorations and wreaths and all that other nonsense, you should be able to find some candy and costumes. At least those trees will give the Turkeys somewhere to hide. Boy, I gotta tell ya that Warbirds Online sure has some neat stuff on it as of late. I personally like the Picture Of The Day. Great stuff, and the Boom & Zoom is a hoot. Ok, enough suckin’ up. Let’s get down to some serious history, shall we?

23 October 1906
Alberto Santos-Dumont won the 3,000 franc Archdeacon prize, flying his 14-bis biplane for nearly 197 feet.

26 October 1907
Henry Farman set the official distance record of 2,530 feet in a Voisin-Farman I.

22 October 1909
Mademoiselle Elise Deroche, better known under her self awarded title ‘la Barrone de Laroche’, made her first solo flight. She learned to fly at Chalons in a Voisin biplane.

26 October 1909
2nd Lieutenant Fredric E. Humphreys of the US Army became the first pilot officer to fly solo, at College Park in Maryland, with a flight lasting 3 minutes in a Wright biplane.

27 October 1909
Mrs. Ralph H. van Deman became the first American woman passenger in an airplane when she was taken aloft by Wilbur Wright.

23 October 1910
The Infante Don Alfonso of Orleans and Bourbon became the first royal pilot. A cousin of King Alfonso of Spain, he learned to fly on an Antoinette monoplane at Mourmelon in France. He was a lieutenant in the Spanish army at the time.

26 October 1910
A Lebaudy airship purchased by the British government flew a 230 mile flight from Aldershot to Moisson in France.

28 October 1910
Monsieur Tabeteau performed a closed circuit record of 289 miles in a Maurice Farman biplane, and ended the superemacy of the Wright biplanes.

22 October 1911
Capitano Carlo Piazza of the Italian army became the first pilot to use an airplane in war. He flew a Bleriot Monoplane from Tripoli to Azzia, on a reconnaissance mission over Turkish forces, during the Italo-Turkish campaign in Libya.

23 October 1912
Teniente de Navio Melchor Z. Escola, Argentina’s first naval aviator, was awarded a pilot’s certificate the Argentine Aero club.

26 October 1912
American Lieutenant John H. Towers conducted trials into the use of aircraft for anti-submarine duties.

27 October 1913
Eugene Gilbert flew a closed-circuit course in a Derperdussin monoplane a St.-Germain-en-Laye, near Paris, at 95 m.p.h to win the Deutsch de la Meuthe cup.

28 October 1916
German ace, Hauptmann Oswald Boelcke was killed when his Albatros fighter collided with another, flown by his comrade, Leutnant Boehme.

28 October 1917
A German Fokker DrI triplane, with Leutnant Heinrich Gontermann in the cockpit, broke up in flight. The type was grounded pending an investigation which revealed deficiencies in the construction of the fighter’s wings.

24 October 1918
The first strengthened Fokker DVIII, called the Fokker E.V, arrived at the Weastern Front and was an immediate success, with a good rate of climb and maneuverability complementing a maximum speed of 127 m.p.h.

26 October 1918
The Inter-allied Independent Air Force was created and Marshal Foch of France was made the supreme commander, with Britain’s General Sir Hugh Trenchard as commander in chief.

23 October 1923
The American Propeller Company demonstrated the first reversible pitch propeller.

25 October 1930
The first American coast-to-coast air service was established by Transcontinental Western Air (TWA).

22 October - 4 November 1934
Sir Charles Kingsford Smith and Captain Taylor made the first airplane flight between Australia and the United States in a Lockheed Altair.

23 October 1934
Italian Francesco Agello, flying a Macchi MC72 seaplane, established a new world speed record of 440 m.p.h.

25 October 1937
Hanna Reitch, flying a Focke-Wulf Fw 61, established a distance record for helicopters of 67 miles.

22 October 1938
Italian Lieutenant Colonel M. Pezzi, flying a Caproni 161-bis at Montecelio, established a new world altitude record of 50,046 feet. No piston engine aircraft has ever bettered this record.

26 October 1940
The North American NA73 fighter prototype, better known as the ‘Mustang’, made its first flight.

23 October 1944
The Battle of Leyte Gulf began and the Japanese introduced Kamikaze suicide attacks, which sank the light carrier the USS ST. LO.

25 October 1944
The Battle of Leyte Gulf ended, marking the end of the Japanese fleet as an effective fighting force. Japan lost 3 battleships, 4 aircraft carriers, 10 cruisers and 11 destroyers during the battle and the Americans lost 3 aircraft carriers, 3 destroyers, and a submarine.

27 October 1944
The 9th Fighter Squadron of the uSAAF operated from Tacloban airstrip, in the first American air operations from the Philippines since 1942.

22 October 1951
A 3rd atomic explosion in the Soviet Union was announced by the White House.

24 October 1951
A proclamation was signed, terminating the state of war between the United States and Germany.

22 October 1952
Details about the Rolls-Royce Conway by-pass jet engine were released.

23 October 1954
The Western nations agreed to end the occupation of West Germany and fully incorporate the German Federal Republic into NATO.

22 October 1962
President Kennedy announced that United States reconnaissance aircraft had established that offensive missile sites were being erected in Cuba.

23 October 1962
The Soviet Union put its forces on alert and challenged the United States’ rights to be concerned with actions in Cuba.

24-29 October 1962
Following lengthy exchanges between Kennedy and Kruschchev, the ‘Cuban Missile Crisis’ was ended. The US agreed not to invade Cuba and the USSR agreed to halt the construction of missile sites and to remove the missiles.

28 October 1975
To demonstrate the maneuverability and short field ability of the Fraco-German Alpha jet, test pilot Jean-Marie Saget landed on and took off from a stretch of roadway linking Paris and Le Mans.

24 October 1978
The US airline industry was deregulated.

26 October 1988
The USAF received its first Hughes Advance Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM).

26 October 1999
A Learjet crashed in South Dakota killing all five occupants, including golfer Paine Stewart. It was believed that the aircraft’s occupants lost consciousness as a result of a pressurization failure.

25 October 2001
The Lockheed Martin X-35 was selected as the winner of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) competition. A production run of up to 6,000 ‘F-35′ aircraft and a contract worth $200 billion to supply the American and British air forces and navies are the rewards.

24 October 2003
The Concorde made its final scheduled commercial flight.
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That’s all for this week, Folks. See ya in seven (more or less).

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