The Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew obsolete biplanes in silence over German lines - and became one of WWII's most effective and feared combat units.
TaildraggerRichard Bong shot down 40 Japanese aircraft over the Pacific - a record no American fighter pilot has matched in over 80 years - and died the same morning the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.
TaildraggerThe F4U Corsair compiled an 11-to-1 kill ratio over Japanese fighters despite being rejected for carrier ops - the full story of the bent-wing bird.
TaildraggerThe Dornier Do 335 Pfeil was the fastest piston-engine fighter of World War Two, and the only surviving example is on display at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.
TaildraggerWiley Post's 1933 solo flight around the world in under eight days remains one of aviation's most overlooked achievements - completed by a one-eyed Oklahoma roughneck who pioneered the autopilot, the pressure suit, and the jet stream.
TaildraggerCarl Ben Eielson pioneered Alaska's airmail routes and crossed the Arctic Ocean before dying in a 1929 mercy mission over Siberia at age 32.
TaildraggerEddie Rickenbacker survived WWI aerial combat, a catastrophic airline crash, and 24 days adrift in the Pacific - an unmatched record of resilience in aviation history.
TaildraggerHurricane R4118 flew 49 combat sorties in 1940, vanished to India for decades, and was restored to flight in 2004 as one of warbird aviation's most documented recoveries.
TaildraggerOn June 14, 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight - eight years before Lindbergh, in a converted bomber with failed instruments.
TaildraggerHow R.J. Mitchell's decade of Schneider Trophy racing produced the design language that made the Spitfire Britain's defining fighter of World War II.
TaildraggerThe Gee Bee R-1 won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252.6 mph - and its story reveals how civilian air racing built the foundation for WWII combat aviation.
TaildraggerThe 332nd Fighter Group flew over 15,000 combat sorties in WWII, built an exceptional bomber escort record, and dismantled the official Army doctrine that said Black men were unfit to fly.
TaildraggerIn July 1938, Douglas Corrigan flew from Brooklyn to Dublin in a plane denied transatlantic clearance and spent 57 years insisting it was an accident.
TaildraggerHow a fire-scorched B-29 abandoned at China Lake became one of two airworthy Superfortresses after a 16-year, 300,000-hour volunteer restoration in Wichita.
TaildraggerIvan Gates turned barnstorming into a scalable business empire that put over a quarter million Americans in airplanes - more than any government program of the era.
TaildraggerJacqueline Cochran rose from a dirt-floor childhood in the Florida panhandle to become the first woman to break the sound barrier and the most decorated pilot in American history.
TaildraggerOn the night of May 16, 1943, nineteen Lancasters flew at sixty feet to deliver Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb and breach two of Nazi Germany's most critical dams.
TaildraggerHow 617 Squadron's nineteen Lancasters breached the Ruhr dams on May 16-17, 1943, using Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bomb.
TaildraggerBessie Coleman became the world's first Black woman to earn an international pilot's license in 1921 after crossing the Atlantic to train in France when every American school refused her.
TaildraggerRoscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times in the 1930s - a record no pilot has ever matched - and flew coast to coast with a lion named Gilmore.
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