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 Granville Brothers built the fastest - and most dangerous - racing aircraft of the 1930s, winning the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252 mph.
On May 20, 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew 3,600 miles from New York to Paris alone in 33 hours - a crossing that permanently transformed aviation.
Glacier Girl is a WWII P-38 Lightning recovered from 268 feet of Greenland ice after 50 years and restored to flight, taking to the skies again in 2002.
Harold Gillam flew Alaska's deadliest routes in weather that grounded every other pilot - until a January 1943 crash in southeastern Alaska ended a legendary career.
On September 24, 1929, Jimmy Doolittle completed the first fully blind flight at Mitchel Field, NY, proving instrument flying was a reproducible skill - not a gamble.
On May 16, 1943, 19 Lancasters from 617 Squadron flew at 60 feet in the dark to breach Germany's Ruhr Valley dams using a spinning bouncing bomb.
Richard Bong scored 40 aerial victories in WWII - more than any American pilot in history - before dying in a jet accident on August 6, 1945, the same morning as Hiroshima.
How the U.S. government's 1919 surplus sale of 6,400 Curtiss JN-4 Jennies created the barnstorming era and introduced a million Americans to flight.
The 1927 Dole Air Race sent eight planes from Oakland toward Hawaii and killed ten people - a cautionary story about what happens when optimism outpaces preparation.
The Me 262 was the world's first operational jet fighter - 100 mph faster than any Allied aircraft - yet Hitler's bomber obsession delayed its deployment long enough to neutralize its potential.
The XB-70 Valkyrie was America's Mach 3 nuclear bomber - a Cold War engineering triumph made strategically obsolete before its first prototype ever flew.
The Vought F4U Corsair was grounded from carrier duty by the U.S. Navy - then handed to the Marines, who made it one of WWII's most feared fighters.
Bessie Coleman became the world's first Black woman to earn a pilot's license in 1921 by learning French and crossing an ocean to train in France after every American school refused her.
Bob Reeve arrived in Valdez, Alaska in 1932 with nine dollars and invented glacier landing techniques that transformed arctic aviation forever.
The Jeppesen approach charts every pilot uses today trace directly to a handmade notebook a 23-year-old airmail pilot kept over the Rocky Mountains in 1930.
Flak Bait, serial number 41-31773, flew 207 combat missions over Europe - more than any other American aircraft in the ETO - and is now being fully restored at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center.
On August 1, 1943, 164 B-24 Liberators flew a low-level strike on Romania's Ploesti oil refineries, producing five Medals of Honor in a single mission - a record never equaled in U.S. military history.
Ormer Locklear invented wing walking in 1917, became America's most famous aviator, and died on film in 1920 when a director's promised light cue never came.
The Curtiss NC-4 completed the first transatlantic flight on May 27, 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh - yet its crew remains largely forgotten.
The 1954 Comet disasters near Elba revealed the hidden mechanics of metal fatigue and permanently transformed how every pressurized airliner is designed and certified.