The history of aviation is written in moments of brilliant achievement and sudden silence. The first week of July gives us both — two milestones on Independence Day twenty years apart, and one disappearance that the world has never stopped trying to explain.

We start on July 4th, 1908, in a grape-growing town in upstate New York, where a motorcycle racer named Glenn Curtiss flew a fragile biplane called the June Bug 1,550 meters in front of witnesses who certified every foot of it. The Scientific American Trophy. The fury of the Wright brothers. And the beginning of a career that would shape American military aviation for the next decade.

Then July 4th, 1927 — nineteen years later to the day — when a sleek wooden aircraft called the Lockheed Vega lifted off from Burbank, California for the first time. No struts, no bracing wires, smooth as an egg and fifty miles per hour faster than anything else carrying passengers. Over the next decade, that aircraft and its sisters would carry Wiley Post around the world, carry Hubert Wilkins over the poles, and carry Amelia Earhart solo across the Atlantic in 1932. The Vega didn't just set records. It made records possible.

And finally, July 2nd, 1937 — when Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan, flying a newer Lockheed design on an around-the-world attempt, made their last radio transmissions to a Coast Guard cutter that could hear them but couldn't respond. The search covered 250,000 square miles of Pacific Ocean and found nothing. The ocean has kept its secret for nearly ninety years.

Two Independence Days. One disappearance. All of aviation between 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.