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.
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 photographed powered heavier-than-air flight.
October: Romanian inventor Henri Coanda (1886-1972), constructed the first jet engine in the world, named the Coanda-1910, exhibited at the International Aeronautical Show in Paris and tested near Paris.
First all-metal aircraft flies, the Tubavion monoplane built by Ponche and Primard in France.
September: First airman to be killed in miltary service - 2nd Lieutenant E. Hotchkiss of the Royal Flying Corps - due to structural failure of the aircraft, a Bristol monoplane.
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.
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.