On This Day in History

  1990:    The USAF receives the 59th and last F-117A Stealth Fighter from Lockheed.

1935:    Larry Bell founds Bell Aircraft, producer among other aircraft of the P-39 Airacobra and the X-1.

1944:    MEDAL OF HONOR. During an attack on the Ploesti oil refineries, Lt Donald D. Pucket’s B-24 receives heavy and direct hits and crashes. For his courage and supreme sacrifice in attempting to save the

1944:   Lt Col Clifford Heflin flies his C-47 on the first landing mission into France to rescue airmen who had parachuted behind enemy lines. (Here shown in a c. 1960 photo)

1912:    Capt Charles DeForest Chandler, Lt Thomas DeWitt Milling, and Lt Henry H. Arnold became the first qualified “Military Aviators.” They receive their badges on 6 October.

1942: The Flying Tigers join the Army Air Forces as the 23rd Fighter Group, Col Robert L. Scott Jr commanding.

  1949:    The USAF gives the B-29 Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, to the Smithsonian Institute.

  1943:    Lt Charles Hall, 99th Fighter Squadron, becomes the first US African-American pilot to shoot down an Axis plane, a German Focke-Wulf 190 over Sicily.

1941:    The Air Corps Ferrying Command (ACFC) sends its first air transport flights from Bolling Field to Scotland via Montreal and Newfoundland. Using modified B-24 Liberator bombers with seats in the bomb bay, the “Arnold