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 Gee Bee R-1 won the 1932 Thompson Trophy at 252 mph, outpacing military fighters by nearly a decade - and claimed the lives of nearly everyone who flew it.
The Hawker Hurricane shot down 55% of Luftwaffe losses in the Battle of Britain, outnumbered the Spitfire two to one, and saved England - then history forgot it.
R.J. Mitchell designed the Supermarine Spitfire's revolutionary elliptical wing while dying of cancer at 42 - and the aircraft outlived him to define the Battle of Britain.
Wiley Post flew solo around the world in 1933 - one-eyed, in a plywood monoplane - and in doing so helped discover the jet stream.
Bob Hoover escaped a German POW camp in spring 1945 by stealing a Focke-Wulf 190 he had never flown - launching one of aviation's greatest careers.
How Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947 - with two broken ribs, a broomstick, and the calm of a man built for exactly that moment.
Clyde Cessna taught himself to fly through a dozen crashes in a Kansas wheat field - and those failures built the most recognized name in general aviation.
On December 14, 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew Voyager nonstop around the world in nine days without refueling, completing one of aviation's last great firsts.
How a Utah C-54 pilot's unauthorized candy drops over blockaded Berlin became Operation Little Vittles and helped the West win the Cold War's first standoff.
Jacqueline Cochran rose from a shoeless Depression-era childhood to hold more aviation records than any pilot in history, male or female.
On April 18, 1943, eighteen P-38 Lightnings flew 435 miles at wave-top height in radio silence to intercept and kill Japan's top naval commander using decoded communications.
Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times between 1934 and 1939, making him the most decorated and most theatrical pilot of aviation's golden age.
On June 4, 1942, the Douglas SBD Dauntless destroyed three Japanese fleet carriers in roughly five minutes at Midway, ending Japan's naval dominance in the Pacific.
The North American XB-70 Valkyrie flew at Mach 3 and rode its own shockwave over the Mojave, but strategic politics and a fatal midair collision ensured only one would survive to reach a museum.
The Republic P-47 Thunderbolt was WWII's heaviest single-engine fighter - renowned not for elegance but for absorbing punishment that should have killed it.
In January 1929, WWI ace Wop May flew 250 miles through subarctic Alberta to deliver diphtheria antitoxin and save children in isolated Fort Vermilion.
Flak Bait, the last surviving Martin B-26 Marauder, flew 202 missions over Europe and is now being preserved at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center.
Frank Luke Jr. shot down 18 enemy targets in 17 days in 1918 to become America's most efficient WWI ace and the first aviator to earn the Medal of Honor.
Harold Gillam flew Alaska's worst weather for 14 years without losing a passenger - until a 1943 crash in the mountains above Ketchikan ended his legendary career.
Ivan Gates never learned to fly, yet his Gates Flying Circus introduced an estimated one million Americans to flight and helped forge U.S. aviation culture in the 1920s.