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.
Eddie Rickenbacker became America's top WWI ace with 26 victories, earned the Medal of Honor in a solo attack on seven German aircraft, and survived 24 days adrift in the Pacific at age 52.
Harriet Quimby became the first woman to cross the English Channel solo in April 1912 - a record-breaking flight history nearly forgot because of the Titanic.
Ormer Locklear invented wing walking as a maintenance fix in 1918, became Hollywood's first aviation stuntman, and died on camera at 28 before the barnstorming era he created had peaked.
Roscoe Turner won three Thompson Trophy races between 1934 and 1939, making him the most decorated closed-course air racer in National Air Races history.
The C-47 that led the entire D-Day airborne formation spent fifty years lost in civil registries before a CAF volunteer researcher tracked it down and flew it over Normandy again.
The de Havilland Mosquito was a twin-engine wooden bomber that outran German fighters and became the most versatile warplane of World War II despite being rejected by the Air Ministry.
On July 23, 1983, a unit conversion error left Air Canada Flight 143 without fuel at 41,000 feet - and a glider pilot in the left seat brought it home.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat was engineered specifically to defeat the feared Mitsubishi Zero and went on to claim 5,163 aerial victories in World War II.
The North American XB-70 Valkyrie - America's only Mach 3 nuclear bomber - never flew its intended mission, but its sole surviving airframe at Wright-Patterson remains one of aviation's most arresting artifacts.
The P-47 Thunderbolt was WWII's most-produced American fighter - 15,686 built - and its air-cooled radial engine made it nearly impossible to shoot down.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - pilot, author of The Little Prince - flew Saharan mail routes, survived a Libyan Desert crash, and vanished on a P-38 reconnaissance mission on July 31, 1944.
How Bob Reeve arrived in Valdez in 1932 with $12 and invented glacier landing techniques that defined Alaska aviation for half a century.
Major Richard Bong, America's all-time top ace with 40 aerial victories and the Medal of Honor, died in a P-80 jet test flight the same morning the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.
How Edwin Musick's meticulous 1935 survey flights across 8,200 miles of open ocean made transpacific commercial aviation possible - and what it actually took to pull it off.
The Flying Tigers were American pilots who flew combat for China against Japan before the U.S. entered WWII, achieving extraordinary kill ratios through Chennault's unorthodox dive-and-run tactics.
The Memphis Belle B-17F survived 25 combat missions over Europe in 1943, then spent 50 years deteriorating outdoors before a landmark restoration brought her inside permanently at the NMUSAF.
In 1924, eight U.S. Army Air Service aviators became the first to fly around the world, covering 27,553 miles in 175 days aboard four Douglas World Cruisers.
The sole surviving Northrop N-9MB flying wing, restored to flight at Planes of Fame in Chino, California, is the direct aerodynamic ancestor of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.
The Supermarine Spitfire's revolutionary elliptical wing design and the tragic story of R.J. Mitchell, who died before his aircraft defined the Battle of Britain.
On May 16, 1943, RAF 617 Squadron breached two German dams with engineer Barnes Wallis's spinning bouncing bomb in one of WWII's most precisely executed raids.