Although aviation has been around for your lifetime, your pursuit of flight training has no doubt given you a new awareness of some of flight’s challenges. It’s hard to believe that man has been flying for centuries (using balloons), and has been utilizing powered flight for more than 100 years.

In the area of powered flight, there were roughly three major eras of innovation and advancement: 1903 (when the Wright brothers first flew) to 1927 (when Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic to Paris); 1927 to the beginning of World War II; and the World War II years to the jet age, which coincides with the beginning of the space age. You certainly could come up with more eras within those, but they represent rough time frames in which quantum leaps in technology, materials, and know-how occurred.

But what if we decided to pick out individual flights? Which individual takeoffs and landings made the largest contributions to aviation? Some are easy to add to the list, some not so much. Some represented gigantic leaps forward in technology and skill, while others quite literally changed the course of history—or even our understanding of the world around us. The only caveat to this list is that all of these flights have to be manned—interplanetary probes don’t count for this compilation.