On May 16, 1943, 19 Lancasters from 617 Squadron flew at 60 feet in the dark to breach Germany's Ruhr Valley dams using a spinning bouncing bomb.
TaildraggerRichard Bong scored 40 aerial victories in WWII - more than any American pilot in history - before dying in a jet accident on August 6, 1945, the same morning as Hiroshima.
TaildraggerHow the U.S. government's 1919 surplus sale of 6,400 Curtiss JN-4 Jennies created the barnstorming era and introduced a million Americans to flight.
TaildraggerThe 1927 Dole Air Race sent eight planes from Oakland toward Hawaii and killed ten people - a cautionary story about what happens when optimism outpaces preparation.
TaildraggerThe Me 262 was the world's first operational jet fighter - 100 mph faster than any Allied aircraft - yet Hitler's bomber obsession delayed its deployment long enough to neutralize its potential.
TaildraggerThe XB-70 Valkyrie was America's Mach 3 nuclear bomber - a Cold War engineering triumph made strategically obsolete before its first prototype ever flew.
TaildraggerThe Vought F4U Corsair was grounded from carrier duty by the U.S. Navy - then handed to the Marines, who made it one of WWII's most feared fighters.
TaildraggerBessie Coleman became the world's first Black woman to earn a pilot's license in 1921 by learning French and crossing an ocean to train in France after every American school refused her.
TaildraggerBob Reeve arrived in Valdez, Alaska in 1932 with nine dollars and invented glacier landing techniques that transformed arctic aviation forever.
TaildraggerThe Jeppesen approach charts every pilot uses today trace directly to a handmade notebook a 23-year-old airmail pilot kept over the Rocky Mountains in 1930.
TaildraggerFlak Bait, serial number 41-31773, flew 207 combat missions over Europe - more than any other American aircraft in the ETO - and is now being fully restored at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center.
TaildraggerOn August 1, 1943, 164 B-24 Liberators flew a low-level strike on Romania's Ploesti oil refineries, producing five Medals of Honor in a single mission - a record never equaled in U.S. military history.
TaildraggerOrmer Locklear invented wing walking in 1917, became America's most famous aviator, and died on film in 1920 when a director's promised light cue never came.
TaildraggerThe Curtiss NC-4 completed the first transatlantic flight on May 27, 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh - yet its crew remains largely forgotten.
TaildraggerThe 1954 Comet disasters near Elba revealed the hidden mechanics of metal fatigue and permanently transformed how every pressurized airliner is designed and certified.
TaildraggerThe Gee Bee R-1 won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252 mph, outpacing military fighters by nearly a decade - and claimed the lives of nearly everyone who flew it.
TaildraggerThe Hawker Hurricane shot down 55% of Luftwaffe losses in the Battle of Britain, outnumbered the Spitfire two to one, and saved England - then history forgot it.
TaildraggerR.J. Mitchell designed the Supermarine Spitfire's revolutionary elliptical wing while dying of cancer at 42 - and the aircraft outlived him to define the Battle of Britain.
TaildraggerWiley Post flew solo around the world in 1933 - one-eyed, in a plywood monoplane - and in doing so helped discover the jet stream.
TaildraggerBob Hoover escaped a German POW camp in spring 1945 by stealing a Focke-Wulf 190 he had never flown - launching one of aviation's greatest careers.
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