Portal:Aviation/Anniversaries/February 23

February 23


 * 2011 – Two United States Marine Corps helicopters, a Bell UH-1Y and a Bell AH-1W, collide at night on the Yuma training range, Arizona, United States. All seven crew members were killed.


 * 2010 – A house cat escapes from its carrier as its owner is traversing a TSA search at Newark Liberty Airport. The 25-lb cat proceeds to wedge itself under a baggage screening machine, forcing a temporary closure of the Terminal A checkpoint.


 * 2010 – Kingfisher Airlines formally submits its application to join the oneworld alliance.


 * 2009 – Lion Air Flight 972, a McDonnell Douglas MD-90-30, registration PK-LIO, lands at Hang Nadim Airport, Indonesia, with the nosewheel stuck in the raised position. The aircraft is damaged significantly.


 * 2008 – Andersen Air Force Base B-2 crash: A Northrop-Grumman B-2A Spirit, 89-0127, 'WM', "Spirit of Kansas", of the 393rd Bomb Squadron, 509th Bomb Wing, Whiteman AFB, Missouri, crashed shortly after takeoff from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. Both pilots ejected from the plane before it crashed, the aircraft was destroyed. Moisture in flight sensors caused steep pitch-up and stall to port.


 * 2008 – Andersen Air Force Base Northrop Grumman B-2 Spririt accident: A United States Air Force B-2 Spirit crashes at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam. It is the first operational loss of a B-2. The crew of two ejects safely, but the aircraft would be the most expensive write-off in history, as each B-2 rings up to around $1.2 billion. The cause of the crash is later determined to have been moisture in the air-data pressure sensors, producing inaccurate speed readings and then an early rotation and subsequent stall.


 * 1997 – A small fire occurs on the Russian Space station, Mir, when a solid-fuel, oxygen-generating canister bursts into flames. There are no injuries.


 * 1991 – Iraqi antiaircraft artillery downs a U. S. Marine Corps AV-8 B Harrier II near Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait.


 * 1990 – A Marine Corps student pilot and his U.S. Navy instructor from Whiting Field, Florida, were killed after two Beechcraft T-34C Turbo Mentors collided in mid-air, near Summerdale, Alabama. One plane crashed near the edge of the field, killing the instructor pilot, Lt. Gordon Bruce Wulf, 29, a Wichita, Kansas, native who lived in Cantonment, Florida, and his student, Marine 1st Lt. Cary K. Smith Jr., 25, of Columbia, South Carolina. The second plane made an emergency landing at another outlying field about 15 miles away near Silverhill, Alabama, with only slight damage and without injury to the instructor pilot or his student.


 * 1981 – Death of Chester Stairs Duffus, Canadian WWI flying ace.


 * 1976 – Death of Pjotr Michailowitsch Stefanowski, Soviet WWII test pilot.


 * 1972 – First flight of the PAC CT/4 Airtrainer, an all-metal construction, single-engine, two place side-by-side seating, fully aerobatic, piston engined, basic training aircraft built in New-Zealand.


 * 1959 – First flight of the Dornier Do 28D Skyservant, a German twin-engine STOL utility aircraft evolution of the Do-28. Redesigned aircraft with box fuselage, larger wing, new tail.


 * 1959 – EWR (Entwicklungsring Süd GmbH) was formed of a Bölkow, Heinkel, and Messerschmitt design consortium to develop a Mach 2 VTOL intercepter.


 * 1959 – Birth of Clayton Conrad Anderson, American engineer and NASA astronaut.


 * 1955 – First flight of the CAC Winjeel, an Australian Two-seat basic trainer aircraft for the RAAF.


 * 1954 – Flying a Douglas XF4D-1, Robert Rahm climbs to 10000 ft in 56 seconds.


 * 1951 – First flight of the Dassault Mystère, a French fighter-bomber prototype with a 30-degree swept wing.


 * 1949 – Death of Thomas Neville Stack AFC, British test pilot, air racer and aviation pioneer. He served in WWI and WWII and was managing director of Pakistan-Orient airways.


 * 1949 – Birth of Joseph Jean-Pierre Marc Garneau, CC CD FCASI MP, Canadian retired military officer, astronaut, engineer and politician. First Canadian in space.


 * 1945 – (February 23-March 2) The night fighter squadron aboard USS Enterprise (CV-6), operating off Iwo Jima, keeps planes airborne for a record 174 consecutive hours.


 * 1945 – Last allied ship sunk by the Luftwaffe in WWII is the Liberty ship SS Henry Bacon, torpedoed in the Barents Sea.


 * 1944 – Aircraft from six aircraft carriers of Task Force 58 make the first Allied strike against Japanese forces in the Mariana Islands, attacking Guam, Rota, and Tinian, discovering the location of Japanese airfields in the islands for the first time, destroying 168 Japanese aircraft, sinking two cargo ships and several smaller craft, and conducting the first Allied photographic reconnaissance missions ever flown over the Marianas.


 * 1942 – First flight of the Polikarpov ITP, a Soviet fighter prototype.


 * 1937 – Douglas delivers its first production B-18 Bolo bomber.


 * 1935 – Leland Andrews breaks Doolittle's January record, completing a transcontinental transport flight in 11 hours 34 min.


 * 1934 – First flight of the Lockheed Model 10 Electra, a twin-engine, all-metal monoplane airliner. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Model_10_Electra


 * 1932 – First flight of the Gloster TC.33, a British large four-engined biplane designed for troop carrying and medical evacuation.


 * 1929 – First flight of the Breguet 27, a French two-seat biplane all-metal observation aircraft.


 * 1928 – Birth of Vasily Grigoryevich Lazarev, a Soviet cosmonaut.


 * 1924 – Lt. John S. Ansley of the 111th Observation Squadron, Texas National Guard, crashes in Curtiss JN-4H, 24-158, (one source gives the type as a Curtiss JN-6) at Ellington Field, Texas, when he enters a tailspin during practice, but at insufficient altitude to recover, the airframe smashing into a pile of stacked lumber. The pilot dies later in hospital.


 * 1921 – A team of pilots completes an experimental coast-to-coast mail flight; flying by day and night, they have linked San Francisco and Long Island in a day and half’s flying time.


 * 1916 – Birth of Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr., brigadier general in the USAF, best known for being the pilot of the B-29 ‘Enola Gay’, the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in the history of warfare.


 * 1914 – First flight of the Bristol Scout, a simple, single seat, rotary-engined biplane originally intended as a civilian racing aircraft.Like other similar fast, light aircraft of the period – It was acquired by the RNAS and the RFC as a “scout”, or fast reconnaissance type. In the event it was one of the first single-seaters to be used as fighter aircraft.


 * 1909 – First flight of the AEA Silver Dart


 * 1901 – Birth of Ruth Rowland Nichols, American aviation pioneer, who was the only woman to hold simultaneous world records for speed, altitude, and distance for a female pilot.


 * 1899 – Birth of George Raby Riley, British WWI fighter ace.


 * 1896 – Birth of Maurice Leblanc-Smith, British WWI flying ace.


 * 1886 – Birth of Didier Masson, pioneering French aviator, barnstormer, second flier in history to bomb a surface warship, WWI fighter pilot and early manager of Pan American World Airways.