Pioneering aviator Vivian Walsh made the first controlled powered flight in New Zealand. He flew the Manurewa more than 350 m at a height of 20 m, watched by a small group of spectators at Glencora Park in Papakura, South Auckland.
An Air NZ Airbus A320 crashed off the coast of France. All seven people on board, including five New Zealanders, were killed. It was 29 years to the day since Air NZ Flight TE901 crashed in Antarctica, killing all 257 on board
The Lockheed Electra airliner ZK-AGK Kaka went missing in poor weather on a flight from Palmerston North to Hamilton. Searchers did not reach the wreckage until a week later.
An attempted hijacking of an Air New Zealand Boeing 747 at Nadi airport, Fiji, was thwarted when a member of the cabin crew struck the hijacker on the head with a whisky bottle.
George Hood and John Moncrieff’s flight was a ‘gallant if somewhat ill-organised attempt to be the first to fly the Tasman from Australia to New Zealand’
Vivian Walsh became the first New Zealander to obtain an aviator's certificate. The New Zealand Flying School had been established at Ōrākei in October 1915.
Australians Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, in their Southern Cross monoplane, landed at Wigram, Christchurch, 14 hours 25 minutes after leaving Sydney. More than 30,000 people thronged to greet them.
George Sellars narrowly escaped serious injury when he was able to sway his parachute just in time to avoid crashing through the glass roof of the Winter Gardens during the Farmers' Christmas parade.
All 23 passengers and crew were killed in what is still New Zealand's worst internal civil aviation accident. Helicopters were used for the first time in the search and rescue operation that followed.
Bolt was an outstanding figure in the development of commercial aviation in this country. He achieved a number of aviation firsts, taking New Zealand's first aerial photographs in 1912 and delivering its first official airmail in 1919
New Zealand's first female military personnel were joined within 18 months by members of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and the Women's Royal Naval Service.
Australian Guy Menzies' flight from Sydney ended in some embarrassment when he crash-landed his Avro Avian biplane in a swamp at Harihari on the West Coast.
All three people on board a Dominion Airline Desoutter were killed in a crash near Wairoa. The airline had helped maintain contact between the areas ravaged by the recent Hawke's Bay earthquake and the rest of New Zealand.
