The history of aviation is full of doors quietly opening — moments that didn't make front-page headlines at the time but changed everything that came after. The second week of July gives us three of them, spanning exactly forty years.

We start on July 8th, 1908, in Milan, Italy, where a French sculptor named Thérèse Peltier watched an exhibition flight and simply asked if she could go up. She became the first woman in recorded history to leave the ground in a powered airplane — thirty-four years old, a passenger for less than a minute, in a Voisin biplane over an Italian airfield. Three years before Harriet Quimby earned the first American woman's pilot license. Thirteen years before Bessie Coleman earned hers in France. The door had already been opened.

Then July 10th, 1938, when Howard Hughes took off from Floyd Bennett Field with a crew of four, determined to fly around the world faster than anyone in history. Four days later, he landed back in New York having covered 14,791 miles and bested Wiley Post's existing record by nearly four full days — through a flight of genuine engineering rigor that pointed directly toward the future of transoceanic aviation.

And finally, July 14th, 1948 — exactly ten years after Hughes landed — when six Royal Air Force Vampire jet fighters completed the first Atlantic crossing by jet aircraft, staging their way from England through Scotland, Iceland, and Greenland to Labrador. It happened quietly, within a military context, with three Mosquito navigators flying alongside because the jets lacked adequate instruments for overwater flight. But it proved the ocean could be crossed by jet. Everything that followed was built on that proof.

Forty years. Three doors. The whole shape of modern aviation on the other side of them.

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.