The F4U Corsair compiled an 11-to-1 kill ratio over Japanese fighters despite being rejected for carrier ops - the full story of the bent-wing bird.
TaildraggerThe Dornier Do 335 Pfeil was the fastest piston-engine fighter of World War Two, and the only surviving example is on display at the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.
TaildraggerWiley Post's 1933 solo flight around the world in under eight days remains one of aviation's most overlooked achievements - completed by a one-eyed Oklahoma roughneck who pioneered the autopilot, the pressure suit, and the jet stream.
TaildraggerEddie Rickenbacker survived WWI aerial combat, a catastrophic airline crash, and 24 days adrift in the Pacific - an unmatched record of resilience in aviation history.
TaildraggerHurricane R4118 flew 49 combat sorties in 1940, vanished to India for decades, and was restored to flight in 2004 as one of warbird aviation's most documented recoveries.
TaildraggerOn June 14, 1919, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown completed the first nonstop transatlantic flight - eight years before Lindbergh, in a converted bomber with failed instruments.
TaildraggerHow R.J. Mitchell's decade of Schneider Trophy racing produced the design language that made the Spitfire Britain's defining fighter of World War II.
TaildraggerThe 332nd Fighter Group flew over 15,000 combat sorties in WWII, built an exceptional bomber escort record, and dismantled the official Army doctrine that said Black men were unfit to fly.
TaildraggerIn July 1938, Douglas Corrigan flew from Brooklyn to Dublin in a plane denied transatlantic clearance and spent 57 years insisting it was an accident.
TaildraggerHow a fire-scorched B-29 abandoned at China Lake became one of two airworthy Superfortresses after a 16-year, 300,000-hour volunteer restoration in Wichita.
TaildraggerIvan Gates turned barnstorming into a scalable business empire that put over a quarter million Americans in airplanes - more than any government program of the era.
TaildraggerJacqueline 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.
TaildraggerBessie 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.
TaildraggerIn 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.
TaildraggerHow 100 American pilots resigned their commissions and defeated the Japanese Air Force over Burma and China before the US officially entered WWII.
TaildraggerPete Knight flew the X-15 to Mach 6.7 on October 3, 1967 - a speed no winged aircraft has matched in nearly 59 years, and a record built on engineering that still shapes aerospace today.
VectorThe Northrop N-9M Flying Wing proved a radical concept in 1942 - and the one survivor at Chino still flies to prove it today.
TaildraggerThe shirttail cut is aviation's oldest training ritual, tracing directly to tandem-cockpit instruction when an instructor's tug on the fabric was the primary means of physical communication.
RampIn 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.
TaildraggerDon Sheldon was the Talkeetna bush pilot who flew the Alaska Range for thirty years, pioneering glacier landing techniques that still define mountain flying today.
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