📜 This Day in History

September 29

• 1011An army of Viking pirates that had besieged the English city of Canterbury for weeks took Archbishop Ælfheah prisoner and seized power.
• 1833The Spanish American wars of independence ended with the death of King Ferdinand VII, with what had once been the Spanish Empire disintegrating into independent Latin American states.
• 1940During a Royal Australian Air Force training exercise over Brocklesby, two planes collided and interlocked in mid-air; the pilot of the upper plane was able to land safely using the lower plane's engines.
• 1957An explosion at the Soviet nuclear reprocessing plant Mayak released 74 to 1,850 PBq of radioactive material.
• 1990The Lockheed YF-22, the prototype for the F-22 Raptor, made its first flight.
• 2006Gol Transportes Aéreos Flight 1907 collided in mid-air with an Embraer Legacy business jet near Peixoto de Azevedo, Brazil, killing 154 people and triggering a national aviation crisis.

Born on this day

• 1547Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright (died 1616)
• 1901Enrico Fermi, Italian-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1954)
• 1936Silvio Berlusconi, Italian businessman and politician, Prime Minister of Italy (died 2023)
• 1943Lech Wałęsa, Polish electrician and politician, 2nd President of Poland, Nobel Prize laureate