Pancho Barnes built the Happy Bottom Riding Club at the edge of Edwards AFB, where America's greatest test pilots found refuge during aviation's most dangerous era.
TaildraggerHow Tex Johnston's barrel roll of the Boeing Dash 80 over Lake Washington in 1955 changed commercial aviation forever.
TaildraggerThe Night Witches flew 23,000 combat sorties in plywood biplanes, becoming one of WWII's most feared bomber units.
TaildraggerOn May 28, 1940, RAF fighters fought and died over Dunkirk in battles the soldiers below never saw.
TaildraggerHow pilot Gail Halvorsen's two sticks of gum sparked Operation Little Vittles during the 1948 Berlin Airlift.
TaildraggerPancho Barnes built the Happy Bottom Riding Club, where test pilots like Chuck Yeager gathered at the edge of the sound barrier.
TaildraggerThe 1945 Gremlin Special crash in New Guinea's hidden Baliem Valley led to one of WWII's most daring rescues using glider snatch recovery.
TaildraggerDozens of WWII warbirds rest on Lake Michigan's bottom, sunk during carrier training near Chicago and now being recovered and restored to fly.
TaildraggerOn May 27, 1958, the McDonnell F-4 Phantom made its first flight — an unwanted jet that became the defining fighter of a generation.
TaildraggerHow sixteen P-38 Lightnings flew 400 miles at wave-top height to intercept and kill Admiral Yamamoto in 1943.
TaildraggerThe Schneider Trophy seaplane races of the 1920s and 1930s directly produced the Spitfire's elliptical wing, Merlin engine, and cooling system.
TaildraggerHow volunteers rescued the B-29 Fifi from a Navy bombing range and restored her to flying condition against impossible odds.
TaildraggerThe true story of an unmanned F-106 Delta Dart that recovered from a flat spin and landed itself in a Montana field in 1970.
TaildraggerThe Gee Bee Super Sportster was a radical 1930s racer built for pure speed in a shoe factory—and it killed nearly every pilot who flew it.
TaildraggerHow a crashed Japanese Zero in Alaska's Aleutian Islands gave Grumman the intelligence to build the F6F Hellcat and turn the Pacific air war.
TaildraggerOn May 26, 1970, the Tupolev Tu-144 became the first commercial transport aircraft to reach Mach 2, a milestone in the Cold War supersonic race.
TaildraggerWiley Post lost an eye in an oil field accident, then set two around-the-world records and invented the pressure suit.
TaildraggerDouglas Corrigan flew from Brooklyn to Dublin in 1938, claiming a compass error on his California flight plan.
TaildraggerHow Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 with two broken ribs and a sawed-off broomstick.
TaildraggerMax Conrad flew a Piper Comanche across the Atlantic over 100 times and set a 7,100-mile solo record that still astounds pilots.
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