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.
The 1934 MacRobertson Air Race from England to Australia pitted purpose-built racers against a commercial airliner - and the result reshaped the future of aviation.
How Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew the Rutan Voyager around the world nonstop in December 1986, landing with just 18 gallons to spare.
Bob Reeve pioneered glacier landing techniques in 1930s Alaska using painted tire tracks and systematic risk assessment, eventually founding Reeve Aleutian Airways.
In 1911, Cal Rodgers flew a grape-soda-sponsored biplane from Brooklyn to the Pacific in 84 days, surviving 15+ crashes to complete the first transcontinental flight in history.
Before crossing the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh spent years as a barnstorming wing walker - the unforgiving apprenticeship that built the most famous pilot in history.
Frank Luke destroyed 18 enemy observation balloons and aircraft in 17 days of WWI combat, becoming America's deadliest and most feared pilot over the Western Front.
Hurricane R4118 is the only Battle of Britain combat veteran still airworthy - found in a field in India after decades and restored to flight in 2004.
On October 9, 1937, American aviator Jimmy Angel landed his Flamingo monoplane atop Venezuela's Auyán-tepui mesa - and couldn't get it back off for 33 years.
The Bristol Beaufighter was WWII's radar-equipped night hunter - combining airborne interception technology with devastating firepower to change the mathematics of nocturnal air war.
The de Havilland Mosquito outran German fighters, flew on wood instead of aluminum, and became the most versatile combat aircraft of World War II.
The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil was the fastest piston fighter of World War II, and the only complete example survives at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center.
The Gee Bee Model R set a world speed record of 252 mph at the 1932 National Air Races - and claimed the lives of nearly everyone else who flew it at the limit.
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was the most distinctive American fighter of WWII - a twin-boomed, twin-engined design that dominated the Pacific and carried America's top ace to 40 kills.
The Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew over 23,000 combat sorties in plywood biplanes against Nazi forces from 1941 to 1945, earning the name 'Night Witches.'
On January 1, 1929, five Army Air Corps airmen flew a Fokker trimotor over Southern California for 150 hours to prove aerial refueling could transform military airpower.
Bessie Coleman became the first African American and first person of Native American descent to earn an international pilot's license in 1921, after learning to fly in France when every U.S. flight school refused her.
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 with two cracked ribs and a piece of broomstick - a story of calculated risk and cold nerve.
Harold Gillam was Alaska's most legendary bush pilot until a 1943 crash in the Coast Range claimed his life at age 39 during a solo rescue attempt.
Jacqueline Cochran broke the sound barrier in 1953, won the Bendix Trophy, and commanded the WASP - the most decorated pilot in history, male or female.
John Alcock and Arthur Brown completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight in June 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh - in an open-cockpit biplane through ice and zero-visibility cloud.