September: Sir George Cayley published his seminal paper On Aerial Navigation, setting out for the first time the scientific principles of heavier-than-air flight.
Late June or early July: Sir George Cayley's coachman became the world's first (uncontrolled) aeroplane pilot, flying a glider designed by his employer for 423ft (130m) across a valley in Brompton, Yorkshire.
Otto Lilienthal: first controlled glider flights, in excess of 300m. Numerous repetitions. Lilienthal, often called the first pilot, also performs the first well-documented and photographed flights. Breaks his spine on the 2500th flight. Leaves highly influential notebooks.
Samuel Pierpont Langley said by some to have flown the heavier-than-air powered unmanned aircraft Aerodrome.
November: Lawrence Hargrave demonstrates stable flight with a tethered box kite.
Octave Chanute publishes his book Progress in Flying Machines, the first history of aviation and highly influential on many early pioneers, including the Wright Brothers.
March 31 : Richard Pearse reputed to have made an uncontrolled powered flight in a heavier-than-air craft, a monoplane of his own construction, that crash lands on a hedge. (This date is computed from circumstantial evidence of eyewitnesses as the flight was not well-documented at the time.)
August: Karl Jatho flies up to 200 feet in a powered heavier-than-air craft
December: After years of dedicated research and development, the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright fly 300 yards in a more practical aeroplane. This is the first controlled powered heavier-than-air flight and the first photographed heavier-than-air flight.
May: First heavy-than-air passenger carrying flight - Wilbur Wright flew Charles W. Furnas for a distance of 2.5 miles in a Wright Model B.
September: Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge became the first person killed in a powered airplane and the first military aviation casualty when Wilbur crashed his two-passenger plane during military tests at Fort Myer in Virginia.
October: Romanian inventor Henri Coanda (1886-1972), constructed the first prototypical jet engine in the world, named the Coanda-1910, exhibited at the International Aeronautical Show in Paris and tested near Paris.
May: Charles Kingsford-Smith, Ulm, Lyon and Warner flew the Southern Cross, a modified Fokker Trimotor from San Francisco to Brisbane - the first crossing of the Pacific Ocean by air.
Messerschmitt Me 262: first jet fighter, test-piloted by Fritz Wendel. Fastest plane of World War II. Mass production started in 1944, too late for a decisive impact.
July 14: Six de Havilland Vampire F3s of RAF No 54 Squadron, commanded by Wg Cdr D S Wilson-MacDonald, DSO, DFC, became the first jet aircraft to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. They went via Stornoway, Iceland and Labrador to Montreal on the first leg of a goodwill tour of Canada and the US where they gave several formation aerobatic displays.
April: The unmanned aircraft Global Hawk flies automatically from Edwards AFB in the US to Australia non-stop and unrefuelled. This is he longest point-to-point flight ever undertaken by an unmanned aircraft, and took 23 hours and 23 minutes.
October: First totally autonomous flight across the Atlantic by a computer-controlled model aircraft.
December: First "centenary" of powered flight (although first powered flight actually dates back 1.5 centuries: in 1852 Henri Giffard flew 15 miles in dirigible with on-board steam engine). Reconstruction of Wright flyer fails to lift off, presumably because the design is not really self-powered but needs a strong headwind.
