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 1927 Dole Air Race sent eight planes from Oakland to Hawaii across 2,400 miles of open Pacific - only two finished, and seven people never came home.
How a crashed Japanese Zero in an Alaskan bog gave American engineers the intelligence to build the F6F Hellcat - the Pacific War's most lethal carrier fighter with a 19-to-1 kill ratio.
The Hughes H-4 Hercules - the largest flying boat ever built - made one 26-second flight in November 1947 and now stands preserved in McMinnville, Oregon.
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning's twin-engine range made it America's deadliest Pacific fighter and carried Richard Bong to 40 aerial victories.
The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was the heaviest single-engine fighter America fielded in WWII, and its toughness and firepower saved the Allied strategic bombing campaign over Europe.
Bob Hoover - the pilot Chuck Yeager called the best he ever saw - escaped a German POW camp by stealing a Focke-Wulf 190 and went on to redefine what airmanship looks like.
In 1911, Cal Rodgers flew a 35-horsepower biplane from Brooklyn to California in 49 days, proving a coast-to-coast crossing was possible despite 15 crashes and no navigation aids.
Flak Bait, the most combat-experienced American bomber in the European Theater, completed 202 missions and bears over 1,000 field-repair patches - now being fully restored by the Smithsonian.
Pancho Barnes built the Happy Bottom Riding Club near Edwards AFB, creating the human infrastructure behind the golden age of American flight test.
The de Havilland Mosquito was a twin-engine wooden bomber rejected by the British Air Ministry in 1938 that became one of the most versatile and survivable aircraft of World War II.
The Memphis Belle completed 25 combat missions over occupied Europe in 1943 and now stands fully restored at the National Museum of the USAF in Dayton.
The Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew over 23,000 combat sorties in fabric biplanes against Nazi Germany, haunting the Eastern Front from 1942 to 1945.
How fifteen years of Schneider Trophy seaplane racing - and the genius of R.J. Mitchell - directly produced the Supermarine Spitfire that defended Britain in 1940.
Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager completed the first nonstop, unrefueled circumnavigation of the globe in December 1986, flying 24,986 miles in nine days aboard the homebuilt Voyager.
Don Sheldon pioneered glacier landing techniques in the Alaska Range across three decades, and his methods remain the standard for high-mountain bush flying today.
Operation Vittles proved a blockaded city of 2.5 million could be sustained entirely by air - and produced one of aviation's most unlikely heroes.
Roscoe Turner's three Thompson Trophy wins remain unmatched after 80 years, making him the definitive figure of golden age American air racing.
The Curtiss NC-4 completed the first transatlantic air crossing in May 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh and two before Alcock and Brown.
The Douglas DC-3 made commercial aviation profitable for the first time in 1935, defined Allied air transport in WWII, and still flies revenue cargo routes on every inhabited continent today.
The Focke-Wulf Fw 190 was Germany's finest piston fighter - how it shocked the RAF in 1941, how Britain accidentally captured one intact, and why fewer than a dozen fly today.