Today in History - August 30: Empty plane flies over Sydney for three hours
In a freak accident, an unmanned plane took off from a Sydney airstrip by itself on August 30, 1955.
When a pilot in training suffered engine troubles, he landed at Bankstown Airport.
After he climbed out, he spun the propeller by hand and the plane unexpectedly started moving on its own.
The Auster, like this one, somehow took off from the runway and began flying in ever wider circles.
For hours the unmanned plane flew over the city, its range extending from Mascot to Vaucluse, over Punchbowl, Rockdale, Redfern and the CBD.
RAAF planes were dispatched from Richmond and Newcastle to shoot down the plane over the ocean, but they were unsuccessful.
Eventually two British pilots JR Bluett and Peter McNay, who had flown up from Nowra, were able to knock the plane out of the sky.
The two pilots were celebrated, but the Australian government was grilled on why it took three hours to successfully intercept a light plane with nobody flying it.
A long-running copyright claim regarding two popular comic book superheroes came to an end on August 30, 1951.
The judge ruled that Fawcett Comics' Captain Marvel was an illegal copy of National Comics' Superman.
In a case that lasted more than ten years, National argued that Captain Marvel's skin-tight costume, cape, superpowers and news reporter alter ego were a direct copy of their own superhero Superman.
The trademark was acquired by Marvel, who created a superhero under that same name in 1967.
Five years later, DC Comics, as National Comics had been renamed, licensed the rights to the original superhero Captain Marvel.
But because Marvel had the trademark on the name, the character was renamed Shazam.
Both superheroes were turned into movies released within a month of each other in 2019.
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