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.
Don Sheldon pioneered glacier landings in the Alaska Range from Talkeetna, Alaska, building the air-access foundation that made modern Denali mountaineering possible.
Flak-Bait, a Martin B-26 Marauder that flew 207 combat missions over Europe - more than any other American aircraft in the theater - is the sole surviving complete Marauder and is currently being restored at the Smithsonian's Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center.
The Soviet 588th Night Bomber Regiment flew over 23,000 combat missions in wood-and-canvas biplanes - and terrified the Wehrmacht enough to earn a nickname.
The Hughes H-4 Hercules flew exactly once on November 2, 1947 - one mile at 70 feet above Long Beach Harbor - and proved every critic wrong.
How eighteen P-38 Lightnings flew 435 miles in radio silence on April 18, 1943, to intercept and kill Japan's greatest naval strategist.
The Northrop YB-49 flying wing first flew October 21, 1947 - a revolutionary bomber canceled under disputed circumstances that became the direct ancestor of the B-2 Spirit.
On November 22, 1935, Pan American's China Clipper became the first aircraft to complete a scheduled transpacific airmail crossing, covering 8,000 miles in seven days.
How R.J. Mitchell designed the Supermarine Spitfire while dying of cancer - and why his elliptical-winged fighter changed the course of 1940.
How Douglas Corrigan flew from New York to Dublin in 1938 after the CAA denied his transatlantic permit three times - and maintained his alibi for the rest of his life.
On September 4, 1936, Beryl Markham became the first woman to fly the North Atlantic solo from east to west - the hard direction, against the wind.
Bessie Coleman became the world's first licensed Black aviator in 1921 by doing what no American institution would allow - learning to fly in France.
Doc, a 1945 Boeing B-29 Superfortress, returned to flight on July 17, 2016, after a 29-year volunteer restoration in Wichita - one of only two airworthy B-29s remaining.
Jimmy Angel, a Missouri barnstormer-turned-bush pilot, discovered the world's highest waterfall from a cockpit in 1933 and later crash-landed on top of it.
Lincoln Beachey was America's first great airshow pilot, performing before an estimated 17 million people before his death at 28 above San Francisco Bay in 1915.
On the night of May 16, 1943, RAF 617 Squadron breached two German dams using Barnes Wallis's revolutionary spinning bomb in one of WWII's most precisely engineered air raids.
Nineteen Lancasters flew at sixty feet above black water on May 16–17, 1943, to breach Germany's Ruhr dams in Operation Chastise.
On August 1, 1943, 177 B-24s flew a low-level strike against Ploesti's oil refineries - earning five Medals of Honor in a single afternoon.
On August 7, 1955, Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston rolled the Dash 80 prototype twice over Lake Washington - and changed commercial aviation history.
Jimmy Doolittle set a world closed-course speed record of 252.686 mph in the Gee Bee R-1 at the 1932 National Air Races - then walked away from racing forever.
The Memphis Belle completed 25 combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe in 1943 and now stands fully restored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base after a 17-year effort.