2006: Comair/Delta Connection Flight 5191, A Bombardier CRJ-200, runs off the end of a runway and crashes at Lexington-Blue Grass Airport (LEX) while attempting an early morning departure, killing all but one of the 50 people on board, the lone survivor being the First Officer, James Polehinke. The crash is soon blamed on the crew mistakenly turning onto runway 26 rather than the assigned runway 22, with the plane having been unable to get airborne within the confines of the short 3500ft runway. The crash breaks a then unprecedented safety streak among commercial airlines in the United States, the last major accident having been the American Airlines Flight 587 crash in New York nearly five years earlier.
1939: The jet age begins, as Germany’s Heinkel He 178, the first fully jet-propelled aircraft, takes its maiden flight.
1913: History’s first loop-the-loop is performed by Lieutenant Petr Nesterov of the Russian Army in Kiev.
1910: Air-ground radio is born in New York. Canadian aviator James McCurdy sends and receives messages between his Curtiss biplane and a ground station in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
1783: French inventor Jacques Charles flies the first balloon filled with gas rather than fire-heated air. He achieves this by pouring 489 lbs. of sulfuric acid on 1,000 lbs. of iron.