On May 16, 1943, RAF 617 Squadron breached two German dams with engineer Barnes Wallis's spinning bouncing bomb in one of WWII's most precisely executed raids.
Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times - a record no pilot has matched - and defined an era of American air racing that shaped the fighter planes of World War II.
The Gee Bee R-1 Super Sportster set a 252 mph Thompson Trophy record in 1932 - and the one man who flew it to its limit immediately retired from racing.
The Vought F4U Corsair was rejected by the Navy for carrier operations yet became the most feared propeller-driven combat aircraft of World War II in the hands of Marine aviators.
On December 23, 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager landed at Edwards Air Force Base after completing the first nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world aboard the Voyager aircraft.
Bessie Coleman became the first African American and first person of Native American descent to earn an international pilot's license in 1921, after every American flight school refused her.
Carl Ben Eielson pioneered Alaska aviation in the 1920s, flew the first transarctic flight in 1928, and died on a November 1929 mercy mission to a fur-trading ship locked in Siberian pack ice.
On August 1, 1943, 178 B-24 Liberators attacked Nazi-controlled oil refineries at treetop level in the costliest and most decorated single-day mission in Army Air Forces history.
How Ivan Gates turned post-WWI surplus planes and unemployed pilots into America's most famous barnstorming operation, putting over a million people in the air.
On July 23, 1983, a unit conversion error left Air Canada Flight 143 without fuel at 41,000 feet - and only exceptional airmanship prevented a catastrophe.
The 1934 MacRobertson Air Race sent 20 aircraft on an 11,300-mile dash from England to Australia, producing the DH.88 Comet and proving commercial aviation's global future.