The pilots, the airframes, and the flights that built modern aviation.
Aviation has more saved-from-oblivion stories per square foot than almost any other field of human endeavor.
Airframes pulled from jungles, glaciers, and crashed-and-buried wartime hideouts. Pilots whose names you know and whose names you don’t. Battles, airlifts, raids, races. The decade-long restorations volunteers spent thousands of hours on because the airplane mattered too much not to fly again.
This is the room where Taildragger holds court.
He’ll tell you about the B-17 that spent fifty years rotting in a Papua New Guinea swamp before a team decided it was coming home, the P-47 dragged out of an ice field in eastern Europe and brought back to flying condition, the Berlin Airlift candy bombers, and the women of the WASPs who weren’t recognized as veterans until decades after they ferried bombers across the country in wartime.
Pattern shows up when a historical lesson lands cleanly in modern training. Vector chimes in when a piece of vintage avionics deserves the engineering treatment.
Every restoration is sourced. Every famous-pilot story is sourced. When a date or a unit number is in dispute, we say so. Welcome to the hangar.
The Swamp Ghost B-17E survived 67 years in a Papua New Guinea swamp to become the most original Flying Fortress left on earth.
TaildraggerThe 16-year restoration of B-29 Superfortress 'Doc' from desert hulk to flying warbird is one of aviation's greatest preservation stories.
TaildraggerThe P-47 Thunderbolt Dottie Mae ditched in an Austrian lake on VE Day 1945, sat submerged for 60 years, and flew again in 2017 after a 12-year restoration.
TaildraggerThe Memphis Belle's 13-year restoration at Wright-Patterson required over 200,000 hours to save America's most famous WWII bomber from decades of neglect.
TaildraggerThe story of Glacier Girl, a WWII P-38 Lightning recovered from 268 feet beneath Greenland's ice cap and restored to flying condition.
TaildraggerThe story of how the most-produced military aircraft in history was pulled from a Russian lake and restored to flight.
TaildraggerOn April 25, 1945, the Eighth Air Force flew its final bombing mission over Europe, striking the Skoda works at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia.
TaildraggerEugene Bullard, born in Georgia in 1895, became the first Black combat pilot in history, flying for France because America refused him.
TaildraggerIn 1958-59, Bob Timm and John Cook kept a stock Cessna 172 airborne for 64 days, setting a record that still stands.
TaildraggerThunder Over Michigan returns to Willow Run Airport, where Ford built a B-24 bomber every hour during WWII.
RampThe Vought F4U Corsair was rejected by the Navy for carrier use but became one of WWII's greatest fighters in Marine Corps hands.
TaildraggerThe story of Pappy Boyington, the Marine Corps' top ace of WWII who turned a squadron of misfits into legends over the Solomon Islands.
TaildraggerOperation Eagle Claw's 1980 desert failure killed eight Americans and reshaped U.S. special operations aviation forever.
TaildraggerIn 1987, 19-year-old Mathias Rust flew a Cessna 172 through Soviet air defenses and landed near the Kremlin, changing Cold War history.
TaildraggerJimmy Angel crashed his Flamingo monoplane atop Venezuela's Auyán-tepui in 1937, proving the world's tallest waterfall existed.
TaildraggerThe story of Whiskey Seven, a D-Day C-47 restored by volunteers and flown back to Normandy 70 and 75 years later.
TaildraggerThomas Fitzpatrick stole a Piper from Teterboro and landed it on a Manhattan street twice—in 1956 and 1958—to win bar bets.
TaildraggerThe Night Witches of the 588th Regiment flew plywood biplanes with dead engines through enemy fire, completing over 23,000 combat sorties on the Eastern Front.
TaildraggerThe National Warplane Museum airshow in Geneseo, New York, delivers an intimate warbird experience on grass that larger shows can't match.
RampHow four open-cockpit biplanes attempted the first flight around the world in 1924, and why Alaska nearly ended it all.
TaildraggerRichard Bong scored 40 aerial victories in the Pacific, making him the highest-scoring American fighter ace in history.
TaildraggerLouise Thaden and Blanche Noyes won the 1936 Bendix Trophy Race outright in a Beechcraft Staggerwing, beating every male competitor.
TaildraggerArt Scholl, one of the greatest aerobatic pilots in history, died filming a flat spin sequence for Top Gun in 1985.
TaildraggerHow a metric conversion error left Air Canada Flight 143 without fuel at 41,000 feet, and a glider pilot landed a 767 with no engines.
TaildraggerThe Doolittle Raid of April 1942 launched sixteen B-25 bombers from a carrier deck to strike Tokyo and alter the course of the Pacific War.
TaildraggerRoscoe Turner won three Thompson Trophies, flew with a lion cub, and became the greatest air racing pilot of the 1930s.
TaildraggerThe B-24 Lady Be Good vanished over the Sahara in 1943 and was found intact sixteen years later, four hundred miles past its base.
TaildraggerFive military aircraft have served for over 60 years each, and the engineering principles behind their longevity apply to all of aviation.
TowerThe story of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the airmail pilot and wartime reconnaissance flyer who wrote The Little Prince and vanished over the Mediterranean in 1944.
TaildraggerDouglas Corrigan flew a patched-up Curtiss Robin from New York to Ireland in 1938, claiming it was a navigational error nobody believed.
TaildraggerThe Gee Bee Super Sportster was the fastest and most dangerous racing airplane of the 1930s, built by five self-taught brothers in a converted dance hall.
TaildraggerThe Red Baron died on April 21, 1918, after breaking his own combat rules—and over a century later, his killer remains disputed.
TaildraggerHow test pilot Tex Johnston barrel-rolled Boeing's only jet airliner prototype over Lake Washington in 1955 — and helped launch the jet age.
TaildraggerHow Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, with two broken ribs and a nine-inch piece of broom handle.
TaildraggerBob Hoover, called the greatest stick-and-rudder pilot ever by Jimmy Doolittle, redefined airmanship through six decades of flying.
TaildraggerDouglas Corrigan 'accidentally' flew from New York to Ireland in 1938 after being denied permission for years.
TaildraggerOn April 20, 1916, the Lafayette Escadrille formed as American volunteer pilots joined France's air war a full year before the U.S. entered WWI.
TaildraggerThe de Havilland Mosquito was a wooden WWII aircraft that outran fighters, carried bomber payloads, and became the most versatile combat plane of the war.
TaildraggerThe decades-long quest to return the de Havilland Mosquito to flight demanded lost woodworking skills, wartime materials, and extraordinary determination.
TaildraggerHow five Texas pilots who bought a forgotten P-51 Mustang in 1957 launched the warbird preservation movement that saved thousands of WWII aircraft.
TaildraggerBeryl Markham became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic east to west in 1936, then vanished from history for fifty years.
TaildraggerThe 1949 Easter Parade delivered nearly 13,000 tons of supplies to blockaded Berlin in 24 hours, breaking Soviet resolve.
TaildraggerThe story of Glacier Girl, a P-38 Lightning recovered from 268 feet of Greenland ice and restored to flight after 60 years.
TaildraggerBeryl Markham made history in 1936 as the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west nonstop.
TaildraggerAfter Pearl Harbor, Pan Am's Pacific Clipper flew 31,500 miles around the world because its Pacific route home no longer existed.
TaildraggerDouglas Corrigan flew a beat-up Curtiss Robin from New York to Ireland in 1938, claiming he read his compass wrong.
TaildraggerThe Grumman F6F Hellcat achieved a 19-to-1 kill ratio and destroyed Japanese naval aviation at the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
TaildraggerThe Fokker Trimotor bridged barnstorming and commercial aviation, shaping bush flying and aircraft design after a fatal 1931 crash.
TowerThe true story of an F-106 Delta Dart that recovered from a flat spin and landed itself in a Montana cornfield in 1970.
TaildraggerOn April 17, 1964, Jerrie Mock became the first woman to fly solo around the world in a Cessna 180 named Spirit of Columbus.
TaildraggerBob Hoover escaped a Nazi POW camp, stole a Focke-Wulf 190, and became the greatest demonstration pilot in aviation history.
TaildraggerThe legendary story of the DC-2½, a Douglas DC-3 flown out of wartime China in 1941 with a mismatched DC-2 wing bolted to its fuselage.
TaildraggerThe story of Old 666, the patched-together B-17 whose June 1943 Buka mission earned two Medals of Honor in a single flight.
TaildraggerOn April 16, 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly across the English Channel—a landmark flight overshadowed by the Titanic disaster.
TaildraggerDoc and FIFI, the world's only two flying B-29 Superfortresses, appeared together at Sun N Fun 2026 for a historic formation flyby.
RampBob Hoover's dead-stick Shrike Commander routine defined airshow flying for 40 years and remains the gold standard for energy management.
TaildraggerThe Women Airforce Service Pilots flew 77 military aircraft types in WWII, yet waited 33 years for veterans' status.
TaildraggerThe Reno Air Races pushed warbirds to 500+ mph at 50 feet off the desert floor for six decades of speed, engineering brilliance, and profound risk.
TaildraggerThe Lockheed Constellation combined revolutionary engineering with unmatched beauty, defining the golden age of propeller-driven air travel.
TaildraggerThe Berlin Airlift sustained a city of 2.5 million by air for 15 months — and one pilot's act of kindness became its most enduring legacy.
TaildraggerIn 1986, Burt Rutan's homebuilt Voyager completed the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world in nine days.
TaildraggerBob Hoover's extraordinary career spanned a WWII prison escape, test flying, and airshow performances that redefined precision aerobatics.
TaildraggerAmelia Earhart was a skilled, courageous pilot whose real legacy is her flying, not her disappearance.
TaildraggerHear it live. Radio Hangar streams aviation talk 24/7 at radiohangar.com.