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.
Jacqueline Cochran rose from a dirt-floor childhood in the Florida panhandle to become the first woman to break the sound barrier and the most decorated pilot in American history.
On the night of May 16, 1943, nineteen Lancasters flew at sixty feet to deliver Barnes Wallis's bouncing bomb and breach two of Nazi Germany's most critical dams.
How 617 Squadron's nineteen Lancasters breached the Ruhr dams on May 16-17, 1943, using Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bomb.
Bessie Coleman became the world's first Black woman to earn an international pilot's license in 1921 after crossing the Atlantic to train in France when every American school refused her.
Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy three times in the 1930s - a record no pilot has ever matched - and flew coast to coast with a lion named Gilmore.
The de Havilland Mosquito - built of wood, crewed by two, carrying no guns - recorded the lowest loss rate of any aircraft in RAF Bomber Command during World War II.
In 1924, two U.S. Army Air Service biplanes completed the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe - 175 days, 363 hours, and 26,345 miles in open cockpits.
How 100 American pilots resigned their commissions and defeated the Japanese Air Force over Burma and China before the US officially entered WWII.
The Northrop N-9M Flying Wing proved a radical concept in 1942 - and the one survivor at Chino still flies to prove it today.
In January 1929, Wop May and Vic Horner flew diphtheria antitoxin 700 miles to Fort Vermilion, Alberta in brutal cold, completing in two days what would have taken dogsled teams three weeks.
In 1911, Cal Rodgers flew coast-to-coast in 49 days aboard a grape-soda-sponsored Wright biplane - crashing 15+ times, flying with a broken arm, and changing aviation forever.
Don Sheldon was the Talkeetna bush pilot who flew the Alaska Range for thirty years, pioneering glacier landing techniques that still define mountain flying today.
On October 21, 1928, seventeen-year-old Elinor Smith flew a Waco biplane under all four East River bridges, launching one of American aviation's most celebrated careers.
Harriet Quimby became the first woman to fly the English Channel on April 16, 1912 - a milestone nearly erased by the Titanic sinking the night before.
The Memphis Belle completed 25 combat missions in 1943, spent decades deteriorating outdoors in Memphis, and was saved by a landmark restoration unveiled May 17, 2018.
On April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightnings flew a precisely calculated intercept mission over Bougainville and shot down Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, architect of Pearl Harbor.
Ormer Locklear invented wing-walking in 1917 as a mechanical fix, not a stunt, and died on camera at 28 performing a night dive for a Hollywood film in 1920.
On August 27, 1939, test pilot Erich Warsitz flew the Heinkel He 178 for six minutes - the first turbojet-powered flight in history - five days before World War II began.
How a five-paragraph memo by an RAF test pilot led to the engine swap that transformed the P-51 Mustang into the war-winning fighter of World War II.
How Howard Hughes built a 320-foot wooden flying boat, silenced Congress with a single 26-second flight, and created the most ambitious aircraft ever constructed.