On July 17, 1938, Douglas Corrigan flew from Brooklyn to Dublin after filing a flight plan for Los Angeles - then blamed a faulty compass for the detour.
TaildraggerBessie Coleman became the world's first Black woman to earn an international pilot's license in 1921, after crossing the Atlantic when every American flight school refused her.
TaildraggerCarl Ben Eielson opened Alaska to air travel in the 1920s before dying at 32 during a 1929 Arctic rescue mission over the Bering Strait.
TaildraggerOn December 14, 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager completed aviation's last great first - a nonstop, unrefueled flight around the world in the Voyager aircraft.
TaildraggerHow a WWII P-38 Lightning buried under 268 feet of Greenland ice for 50 years was located, excavated, and restored to flight in 2002.
TaildraggerOrmer Locklear invented wing walking from a loose radiator cap in 1918 and became America's most famous aviator - until a Hollywood night flight killed him at 28.
TaildraggerOn January 2, 1967, Colonel Robin Olds led 78 F-4 Phantoms in a deception mission that destroyed seven MiG-21s in twelve minutes without a single American loss.
TaildraggerOn October 1, 1942, America secretly flew its first jet-powered aircraft - the Bell XP-59A Airacomet - at Muroc Dry Lake, California, with a dummy wooden propeller bolted to the nose as cover.
TaildraggerOn February 2, 1970, an F-106 Delta Dart recovered from an unrecoverable flat spin without its pilot and belly-landed itself in a Montana cornfield.
TaildraggerThe 1927 Dole Air Race sent 8 aircraft 2,400 miles across the open Pacific to Hawaii - only 2 arrived, and 7 crew members were never found.
TaildraggerOn April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers launched from the USS Hornet and struck Tokyo, cracking Japan's myth of invulnerability and setting in motion the chain of events that led to Midway.
TaildraggerThe Lady Be Good vanished into the Libyan desert in 1943 and sat undisturbed for 16 years - a navigation failure that still instructs pilots today.
TaildraggerThe Memphis Belle B-17F completed 25 combat missions over Nazi Germany in 1943, survived decades of outdoor neglect, and was fully restored at Wright-Patterson in 2018.
TaildraggerThe Vought F4U Corsair was rejected by the U.S. Navy for carrier operations yet became one of the most feared combat aircraft of the Pacific War.
TaildraggerBob Reeve arrived in Alaska in 1932 with $11 and a wheel-equipped plane, pioneered systematic glacier landings, and built Reeve Aleutian Airways into a 50-year institution.
TaildraggerOn October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis past Mach 1 over the Mojave Desert - with two broken ribs and a piece of broomstick in the cockpit.
TaildraggerOn September 30, 1929, Fritz von Opel flew a 16-rocket delta-wing glider for 75 controlled seconds over Frankfurt - the forgotten flight that seeded modern rocketry and jet combat aircraft.
TaildraggerOn April 16, 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the English Channel - then lost her moment in history to the Titanic disaster the night before.
TaildraggerJacqueline Cochran rose from poverty in the Florida Panhandle to become the first woman to break the sound barrier and hold more aviation records than any pilot in history.
TaildraggerLincoln Beachey invented the American airshow before the term existed, pioneering the Death Dip and inverted flight before dying at 27 in 1915.
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