Warbirds Online » Blog Archive » This week In Military/Aviation History 26 January

Hello Folks, I’m back. I’ve been gone for two weeks. Did you miss me? My ‘puter was in the shop. I had an issue with Microsoft Flight Simulator 10, more commonly known as FSX. Ya see I went and bought the expansion pack for FSX called “Acceleration”. I had a copy of FSX installed but it was actin’ funny, so I thought I’d uninstall it and put a new copy in. WRONG!! The sucker wouldn’t reinstall. Since I had already had my ‘puter upgraded to accept and run FSX in the first place, and needed it to be installed by my Guru as I couldn’t seem to do it myself, I was not going to let it go. Once again I needed it to be installed by him AND add the expansion pack. I didn’t think it would take very long. WRONG!! He had one heck of a time trying to get it to go in. He finally found the problem which was a licensing issue. He had to track down and remove the file that had the original license in it and remove it. Long story short, it’s back, FSX and Acceleration are working fine. I have enough new stuff to keep me busy for months, maybe years as I threw in Mission: Combat Force and Flight Deck 5 while I was at it. (I never learn). With that being said, let’s get down to some serious history, why don’t we?

February 1910
Hugo Junkers patented an airplane with a cantilevered wing.

1 February 1911
Burgess and Curtiss became the first fully licensed aircraft manufacturer in the USA.

February 1912
Jules Vedrine made the first 100 m.p.h. flight in his Monocoque Deperdussin.

February 1913
The Spanish air arm was renamed as the Servico de Aeronautica Militar Espanola.

3 February 1913
The Gothaer Waggonfabrick (Gotha railway wagon factory) opened an airplane division.

February 1914
The first aerial torpedo was released from a Farman biplane by General A. Guidoni of the Italian Army.

February 1915
The Russian Ilya Nourometz IMV series of 4-engined bombers were equipped with machine guns for use against ground targets.

3 February 1915
Turkish forces attacked the Suez Canal area but were repelled by British troops.

2 February 1916
Zeppelin LZ54 was shot down by British aircraft over the North Sea.

31 January 1917
Germany declared the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare.

1 February 1917
The German Friedrichshafen GIII bomber, capable of carrying 3,390 pounds of bombs, became operational.

February 1918
The Airco DH4, the first American mass-produced combat aircraft, began production.

The first operational squadrons of the American Expeditionary Force were formed in France. American Air Force squadrons went on to destroy 781 enemy aircraft.

Lieutenant Stephen W. Thompson became the first American pilot to gain an aerial victory while serving with an American squadron.

February 1923
The first Japanese fighter aircraft, the Mitsubishi IMF1, landed and took off from a Japanese aircraft carrier IJN Honsho. The pilot was a Briton, Captain Jordan.

3-4 February 1925
A distance record of 1,967 miles in a straight line, was established by a Breguet 19 flown by Captain Ludovic Arrachart and Captain Henri Lemaitre.

2 February 1932
The International Disarmament Conference began in Geneva but failed to ensure world peace.

30 January 1934
The Soviet balloon “Osoaviakhim” ascended 13 miles into the atmosphere.

3 February 1934
The First scheduled trans-ocean airmail service was established between Europe and South America by Deutche Lufthansa. Flying from Stuttgart to Buenos Aires via Seville, Bathurst and Natal. The delivery time was four days.

3 February 1935
It was announced that Dr. Hugo Junkers, one of the pioneers of all metal construction, had died.

1 February 1940
The Southern Rhodesian government formed Southern Rhodesian Air Services.

28 January 1941
Luftwaffe aircraft dropped mines into the Suez Canal.

1 February 1942
The first United States carrier offensive was made by the USS Enterprise and USS Yorktown. Their aircraft attacked targets on several of the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.

27 January 1943
The first USAAF heavy bomber attack on Germany took place. Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses of the 1st Bombardment Wing, 8th USAAF, attacked Emden and Wilhelmshaven.

26 January 1946
The USAAF established its first experimental guided missile group at Elgin Air Force Base in Florida.

Colonel William H. Council, piloting a Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, made a record breaking flight from Long Beach in Los Angeles to La Guardia in New York. It was the fastest crossing of the United States to date – 2,470 miles in 4 hours 13 minutes 26 seconds at an average speed of 584 m.p.h. and also the longest non-stop flight by a jet aircraft.

30 January 1948
Orville Wright died in Dayton, Ohio, aged 76.

28 January 1950
President Truman announced that the Atomic Energy Commission had been directed to continue its work on all forms of atomic energy weapons including the hydrogen or super-bomb. Restricted areas for flying around American atomic installations and off the coast would be established.

1 February 1950
Eight Grumman F9F Panthers landed on the USS Valley Forge, completing the first aircraft carrier night-landing trial by jets.

31 January 1951
Captain Charles Blair flew a Mustang piston engine fighter non-stop from New York to London covering 3,500 miles in 7 hours 48 minutes.

31 January 1953
Wonsan in North Korea was bombed by American carrier-borne aircraft.

3 February 1955
The official termination of war between Czechoslovakia and Germany was announced.

1 February 1956
The Air Planning Group of the West German Ministry of Defense initiated a pilot training scheme, marking the first practical steps in the creation of the post war Luftwaffe.

1 February 1958
Explorer I was launched and became the first United States satellite to enter Earth orbit.

3 February 1959
Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens died when a single-engined Beechcraft Bonanza crashed near the Mason City airport.

31 January 1961
NASA launched a Mercury capsule containing a chimpanzee named Ham. Ham was recovered successfully.

26 January 1965
Brazil’s naval air arm was re-established as an independent service. It had been absorbed by the air force in 1941.

31 January 1966
The Soviet Union launched Luna 9, an unmanned spacecraft that became the first man-made vehicle to soft land on the moon’s surface, on 3 February.

27 January 1967
Roger Chaffee, Virgil Grissom and Edward White burned to death during a ground accident in the Apollo 1 capsule.

31 January-9 February 1971
Apollo 14 made the third successful United States Moon landing.

1 February 1975
In the previous sixteen days all eight world time-to-height records had been captured by a specially modified McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle. The final record set a time of 3 minutes 27 seconds from standstill to a height to 98,425 feet.

28 January 1981
Pan American World Airways began a twice weekly New York to Beijing service.

1 February 1981
Donald W. Douglas, founder of the Douglas Aircraft Company, died aged 88.

27 January 1982
The Cessna Aircraft Company delivered its 1,000th business jet, a Citation II.

27 January 1983
British Aerospace handed over the first of their Sea Harrier FRS Mk 51 aircraft to the Indian Navy.

28 January 1986
United States space shuttle Challenger exploded 75 seconds after lift off. The crew of seven were killed, including Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher and first person to fly under the “citizen in space” program.

1 February 1989
The FAA ordered Boeing to expect the plumbing and wiring on the 1,755 airliners they had built since 1980, following concerns after the 1988 crash of a British Midland airliner.

27 January 1993
Boeing and Airbus Industrie launched a development program for a “Super Jumbo” capable of carrying up to 800 passengers.

28 January 1998
A Eurocopter Super Puma helicopter operated by Bristow helicopters lifted a record payload of 2 crew and 41 passengers, more than twice the normal number of passengers, during flood relief operations in Northern Australia.

30 January 2001
Contact with the deep space probe Pioneer 10 was lost. The last signal received from the probe was about 7 billion miles from Earth. Launched in 1972, it was the first man made object to leave the solar system.

1 February 2003
United States space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts. The wreckage fell over California, Arizona and Texas.

29 January 2005
Nonstop flights between mainland China and Taiwan took off for the first time since 1949.

3 February 2005
Kam flight 904 crashed. There were no survivors.
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That’s it for this week Folks. See ya in seven.

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