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.
On January 2, 1967, Colonel Robin Olds led 78 F-4 Phantoms in a deception mission that destroyed seven MiG-21s in twelve minutes without a single American loss.
On October 1, 1942, America secretly flew its first jet-powered aircraft - the Bell XP-59A Airacomet - at Muroc Dry Lake, California, with a dummy wooden propeller bolted to the nose as cover.
On February 2, 1970, an F-106 Delta Dart recovered from an unrecoverable flat spin without its pilot and belly-landed itself in a Montana cornfield.
The 1927 Dole Air Race sent 8 aircraft 2,400 miles across the open Pacific to Hawaii - only 2 arrived, and 7 crew members were never found.
On April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25 Mitchell bombers launched from the USS Hornet and struck Tokyo, cracking Japan's myth of invulnerability and setting in motion the chain of events that led to Midway.
The Lady Be Good vanished into the Libyan desert in 1943 and sat undisturbed for 16 years - a navigation failure that still instructs pilots today.
The Memphis Belle B-17F completed 25 combat missions over Nazi Germany in 1943, survived decades of outdoor neglect, and was fully restored at Wright-Patterson in 2018.
The Vought F4U Corsair was rejected by the U.S. Navy for carrier operations yet became one of the most feared combat aircraft of the Pacific War.
Bob Reeve arrived in Alaska in 1932 with $11 and a wheel-equipped plane, pioneered systematic glacier landings, and built Reeve Aleutian Airways into a 50-year institution.
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager flew the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis past Mach 1 over the Mojave Desert - with two broken ribs and a piece of broomstick in the cockpit.
On September 30, 1929, Fritz von Opel flew a 16-rocket delta-wing glider for 75 controlled seconds over Frankfurt - the forgotten flight that seeded modern rocketry and jet combat aircraft.
On April 16, 1912, Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the English Channel - then lost her moment in history to the Titanic disaster the night before.
Jacqueline Cochran rose from poverty in the Florida Panhandle to become the first woman to break the sound barrier and hold more aviation records than any pilot in history.
Lincoln Beachey invented the American airshow before the term existed, pioneering the Death Dip and inverted flight before dying at 27 in 1915.
The Bockscar nearly didn't survive its own mission on August 9, 1945 - a story of mechanical failure, a shielded city, and a crew running on fumes over the Pacific.
The de Havilland Mosquito proved that speed alone could replace defensive armament, flying over 36,000 wartime sorties with loss rates far below the heavy bomber force.
The Douglas DC-3 revolutionized air travel in 1936, then became the C-47 that carried paratroopers into Normandy and earned Eisenhower's designation as one of four weapons that won WWII.
On July 23, 1983, a metric unit conversion error left Air Canada Flight 143 with less than half its required fuel, forcing a dead-stick landing in a Boeing 767.
The Gee Bee Super Sportster was the fastest propeller-driven aircraft in America in the early 1930s - and its extreme design left fingerprints on every WWII fighter that followed.
The Hawker Hurricane destroyed roughly 55% of Luftwaffe aircraft during the Battle of Britain - more than the iconic Spitfire - yet history has largely forgotten it.