Eugene Lefebvre (1878–1909), while test piloting a new French-built Wright biplane, crashes at Juvisy, France when his controls jam. Lefebvre dies, becoming the first 'pilot' in the world to lose his life in a powered heavier-than-air craft.

Aviator Eugene Ely performs the first take off from a ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He took off from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in a Curtiss pusher.

Aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly in an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean (she was a passenger; Wilmer Stutz was the pilot and Lou Gordon the mechanic).

Aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly in an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean (she was a passenger; Wilmer Stutz was the pilot and Lou Gordon the mechanic).

Captain Chuck Yeager of the U.S. Air Force flies a Bell X-1 rocket-powered experimental aircraft, the ''Glamorous Glennis'', faster than the speed of sound - over the high desert of Southern California - and becomes the first pilot and the first airplane to do so in level flight.

Cold War: in Moscow, downed American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced to ten years imprisonment by the Soviet Union for espionage.

The Cuban Missile Crisis begins: A U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane and its pilot fly over the island of Cuba and take photographs of Soviet missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads being installed and erected in Cuba.

Aeroflot Flight 593 crashes in Siberia when the pilot's fifteen-year old son accidentally disengages the autopilot, killing all 75 people on board.