Airplane

National Aviation Day was established in 1939 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It’s a day to celebrate the development of aviation and space flight, though I seriously doubt they had space on their minds in the late 30's. Roosevelt could have chosen December 17 for National Aviation Day; the day the first practical manned fixed-wing aircraft made a sustained flight near Kitty Hawk North Carolina. He might have picked May 21, the day Charles Lindbergh became the first to complete a transatlantic flight in a heavier-than-air craft. But he settled on August 19, the day that Orville Wright was born. Orville was 68 in 1939. His brother Wilbur might have been miffed at being overlooked, had he not died nearly thirty years before. Replicas of two gliders and a kite the Wright brothers built hang in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, alongside their actual 1903 flying machine.