Every so often, the calendar plays a trick on aviation history — and this week, we're letting it. The third week of July centers on a single date, July 15th, which somehow hosted three of the biggest moments in the entire story of flight, in three completely different decades.

We start on July 15th, 1916, in Seattle, where a timber merchant named William Boeing filed paperwork to incorporate a small company building seaplanes out of a converted boathouse. Nothing about that afternoon suggested it would eventually lead to the 747. It just did.

Then July 15th, 1933 — seventeen years later, same date — when a one-eyed Oklahoma pilot named Wiley Post climbed into a Lockheed Vega before dawn at Floyd Bennett Field to attempt something no one had ever done: fly solo around the entire world. He used an early autopilot to grab short naps over Siberia. He landed seven days later having completed the journey more than twenty hours faster than his own previous record, set with a navigator two years before.

And finally, July 15th, 1954 — twenty-one years after that, same date again — when a brown-and-yellow jet prototype called the Dash Eighty lifted off from Boeing Field in Seattle, carrying the company's entire financial future on its wings. A year later, a test pilot would barrel-roll that same aircraft twice over Lake Washington in front of the executives who needed convincing, tell them he had simply been "selling airplanes" — and the jet age for ordinary travelers began.

Three stories. One date. Thirty-eight years apart, and somehow all connected by the same square on the calendar.

Windows of Flight is brought to you by the Border Series — aviation thriller novels by host Eric Ristau. Old bold pilots, vintage aircraft, and plots ripped straight from today's headlines. Find the Border Series wherever books are sold, and learn more at www.ericristau.com.