Aviation history and storytelling with Taildragger. Warbird restorations, legendary pilots, famous flights, and the stories that shaped aviation from the Wright Brothers to the Space Shuttle.
How Pan American's Martin M-130 flying boats and Captain Edwin Musick conquered 8,000 miles of open Pacific to launch the first scheduled transoceanic air service in 1935.
The 1927 Dole Air Race sent eight aircraft toward Hawaii for a $25,000 prize and cost ten lives when ambition outpaced training and airworthiness.
The Lockheed Constellation cut New York-to-Paris travel to 13 hours in 1946, redefining transatlantic flight through pressurization, range, and a design born from Howard Hughes's audacious 1939 spec.
The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt became WWII's most-produced American fighter - over 15,600 built - and the most survivable combat aircraft of the war.
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager became the first person confirmed to fly faster than sound, reaching Mach 1.06 at 43,000 feet over the Mojave Desert.
Jacqueline Cochran was the most decorated aviator of the 20th century - over 200 records, the first woman to break the sound barrier, and architect of the WASP program.
In 1928, Punch Dickins flew 4,000 miles over Canada's unmapped Barren Lands in a single-engine Fokker with no radio, earning the McKee Trophy and opening the Arctic north to aviation.
On January 2, 1967, Colonel Robin Olds destroyed seven North Vietnamese MiG-21s in twelve minutes by making his F-4 Phantoms look like easy prey.
The Curtiss NC-4 completed the first aerial crossing of the Atlantic in May 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh - and the original aircraft is on free display in Pensacola, Florida.
On August 16, 1942, Navy blimp L-8 drifted back to shore near San Francisco fully intact - but without its two-man crew, who were never found.
The Schneider Trophy seaplane races of the 1920s–30s produced the aerodynamic knowledge that built the Spitfire - and one woman's £100,000 kept that chain unbroken.
The Swamp Ghost B-17F Flying Fortress ditched in a Papua New Guinea swamp in 1942 and was recovered 64 years later, remarkably intact, preserved by the swamp's unusual chemistry.
The F4U Corsair's inverted gull wing solved a propeller-clearance problem and produced the Pacific War's most feared fighter, known to Japanese pilots as 'Whistling Death.'
Don Sheldon was the Talkeetna bush pilot who pioneered glacier landing techniques on the Ruth and Kahiltna that still define Alaska Range mountain flying today.
Douglas Bader lost both legs in a 1931 aerobatic crash at age 21, fought his way back into the RAF, and led Spitfire wings over occupied Europe during World War II.
On July 17, 1938, Douglas Corrigan departed Brooklyn bound for Los Angeles and landed in Dublin, Ireland - the wrong-way Atlantic crossing nobody could prove was intentional.
Operation Chastise on May 16–17, 1943 sent nineteen Lancasters to breach the Ruhr dams using Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bomb and some of the most demanding low-level flying in aviation history.
The B-29 'Doc' spent over 40 years abandoned at China Lake before volunteers flew her home to Wichita and restored her to flight in 2016.
The Boeing 307 Stratoliner was aviation's first pressurized airliner - and its sole survivor had to sink in Elliott Bay before it could reach the Smithsonian.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat achieved a 19-to-1 kill ratio in WWII and produced the top-scoring U.S. Navy ace in history, David McCampbell, who downed nine aircraft in a single sortie.