December 17, 1903
1903: Orville Wright makes the first sustained, controlled power airplane flight in the Kill Devil Hills, near Kitty Hawk. In the fourth and longest ...
December 16, 1992
1992: At night, a B-52 from the 668th Bomb Squadron (Griffiss AFB) loses two engines in flight when one explodes and damages another. Two other ...
December 15, 1964
1964: In an FC-47, Capt Jack Harvey and his crew fly the first gunship mission in the Vietnam War. The FC-47 later becomes ...
December 14, 1988
1988: W. Stuart Symington, the first Secretary of the Air Force, dies at his home in New Canaan, Connecticut.
December 13, 1933
1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt presents the first Air Mail Flyer’s Medal of Honor to Mal Bryan Freeburg.
December 10, 1954
1954: On a rocket-propelled sled run, Lt Col John P. Stapp attains 632 MPH (equal to Mach 1.7 at 35,000 feet) and decelerates to ...
December 9, 1948
1948: MACKAY TROPHY. An arctic storm forces a C-47 Skytrain to land on the Greenland ice cap, stranding the crew of seven. In a rescue ...
December 8, 1987
1987: The US and Soviet Union sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty to remove all intermediate range nuclear missiles (620 to 3,415 miles) from ...
December 7, 1941
1941: The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor and bring America into WW II. Two waves of Japanese fighters sink four U.S. battleships and damaged nine ...
December 6, 1963
1963: Maj Robert W. Smith pilots the NF-104A Aerospace Trainer, with its ballistic controls (attitude control nozzles on the wing tips, nose, and tail) ...