July was a good month for the advent of flight, but subsequently produced some memorable mishaps; Disneyland opened this month, a famous lady arrived in the United States, and a pandemic – unfortunately not COVID – was officially declared done.

In 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier landed on the Gaspe Peninsula in Quebec on the first of his three voyages to North America. At the rocky headland of Gaspe known as Penouille Point, Cartier erected a 10-m. cross bearing the arms of France and claimed the territory for King Francis I.

In 1609, explorer Samuel de Champlain sailed into what was later named Lake Champlain in New York.

In 1776, Captain Cook sailed from Plymouth, England, on a voyage to Vancouver Island.

In 1808, explorer Simon Fraser reached the Pacific Ocean near what is now Vancouver. Fraser thought he had been on the Columbia River, but was actually on the river that now bears his name.

In 1836, Canada’s first railway, the Champlain and St. Lawrence, started service between Laprairie and St. Jean, Que.

In 1845, English explorer Sir John Franklin disappeared while on an expedition in the eastern Arctic trying to chart and navigate the Northwest Passage. It was later learned that Franklin’s ships were frozen in ice west of King William Island. Franklin died June 11, 1847, and his 105 crew members perished while trekking southward.

In 1884, France presented the Statue of Liberty to the United States.

In 1886, the first Canadian Pacific Railway passenger train from Montreal reached Port Moody, BC, after a 139-hour trip. The first eastbound train left the next day.

In 1891, a railway linking Edmonton and Calgary was completed.

In 1900, the first rigid zeppelin airship, created by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, took flight near Lake Constance in Germany. It carried five people, reached an altitude of 396 metres and flew a distance of six kilometres in 17 minutes.

In 1909, French aviator Louis Bleriot became the first man to fly over the English Channel. His 37-minute flight earned him a prize of $2,500 from the London Daily Mail newspaper.

In 1909, Orville Wright established a world duration record for airplanes when he and passenger, Lieutenant Frank Lahm, remained aloft for one hour and 12 minutes.

In 1909, the US government bought its first plane from the Wright brothers.

In 1937, American aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific while attempting to circle the globe. After taking off from New Guinea and reporting by radio that they were lost and running out of fuel, the pair did not reach their destination of Howland Island and were never heard from again.

In 1938, pilot Douglas Corrigan took off from New York for a flight to California. He landed in Dublin, Ireland, and earned the nickname “Wrong-way Corrigan.”

In 1937, the first successful helicopter flight was conducted in Bremen, Germany.

In 1943, Trans-Canada Air Lines inaugurated transatlantic service.

In 1955, Disneyland opened in Anaheim, Calif.

In 1965, a bomb sent a Canadian Pacific Airlines plane crashing into BC’s Gustafsen Lake, killing 52 people.

In 1969, the “Apollo 11” spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific, ending the historic flight which first put a man on the moon.

In 1970, an Air Canada flight from Montreal crashed while trying to land at Toronto International Airport, killing all 109 on board.

In 1983, an Air Canada 767 made an emergency glide landing on an airstrip in Gimli, Man. The plane ran out of fuel in mid-air due to confusion over the metric system and fuel metering problems. None of the 61 passengers were hurt during the landing but some suffered minor injuries during the emergency evacuation. The infamous incident gained the aircraft the nickname – the “Gimli Glider.”

In 1986, explorers from an oceanographic institute in Massachusetts used a small submarine to reach the site of the wreck of the “Titanic.” They launched a robot camera that gave them a view of the interior. The luxury cruise ship, which sank on its maiden voyage in 1912, had been discovered off Newfoundland in September 1985.

In 1988, nine-year-old Emma Houlston of Medicine Hat, Alta., became the youngest pilot to fly across Canada when she landed her single-engine plane in St. John’s, Nfld. Emma and her father had left Victoria two weeks earlier.

In 2000, an Air France Concorde supersonic jet on its way to New York from Paris, crashed in a huge fireball two minutes after takeoff, hitting a hotel. All 109 people on board and four on ground were killed. It was the first crash of a Concorde.

In 2002, American multi-millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett became the first to circle the world solo in a balloon, travelling more than 31,000 km. He started June 19 from Northam, Western Australia and landed in the Outback, 1,400 km northwest of Sydney.

In 2003, the second outbreak of SARS in Toronto was declared over by the World Health Organization.

In 2016, the final leg of the five-year voyage ended when NASA’s solar-powered Juno spacecraft fired its main rocket engine and gracefully slipped into orbit around Jupiter.