December 31, 1968

1968Gerry Dee, Canadian comedian, actor, and screenwriter^[†]

Gerry Dee is a Canadian actor, stand-up comedian, game show host, director, producer, and writer. He is the host of Family Feud Canada. He placed third on the fifth season of Last Comic Standing, and he wrote and starred in the sitcom Mr. D, which aired on CBC Television.

1968Junot Diaz, Dominican-born American novelist, short story writer, and essayist^[†]

Junot Díaz is a Dominican American writer, creative writing professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a former fiction editor at Boston Review. Central to Díaz's work is the immigrant experience, particularly the Latino immigrant experience.

1968The first flight of the Tupolev Tu-144, the first civilian supersonic transport in the world.^[†]

The Tupolev Tu-144 is a Soviet supersonic passenger airliner designed by Tupolev in operation from 1968 to 1999.

1968MacRobertson Miller Airlines Flight 1750 crashes near Port Hedland, Western Australia, killing all 26 people on board.^[†]

On 31 December 1968 a Vickers Viscount aircraft departed from Perth, Western Australia for a flight of 724 nautical miles (1341 km) to Port Hedland. The aircraft crashed 28 nautical miles (52 km) short of its destination with the loss of all twenty-six people on board. More than half of the right wing, from outboard of the inner engine to the wingtip, including the outer engine and its propeller, broke away from the rest of the aircraft in flight and struck the ground a significant distance from the main wreckage. Investigation by the Australian Department of Civil Aviation and British Aircraft Corporation concluded that a mysterious action during maintenance led to extensive fatigue cracking in the right wing spar. This accident remains the third worst in Australia's civil aviation history.