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.
Operation Chastise on May 16–17, 1943 sent nineteen Lancasters to breach the Ruhr dams using Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bomb and some of the most demanding low-level flying in aviation history.
The B-29 'Doc' spent over 40 years abandoned at China Lake before volunteers flew her home to Wichita and restored her to flight in 2016.
The Boeing 307 Stratoliner was aviation's first pressurized airliner - and its sole survivor had to sink in Elliott Bay before it could reach the Smithsonian.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat achieved a 19-to-1 kill ratio in WWII and produced the top-scoring U.S. Navy ace in history, David McCampbell, who downed nine aircraft in a single sortie.
The 1934 MacRobertson Air Race from England to Australia pitted purpose-built racers against a commercial airliner - and the result reshaped the future of aviation.
How Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew the Rutan Voyager around the world nonstop in December 1986, landing with just 18 gallons to spare.
Bob Reeve pioneered glacier landing techniques in 1930s Alaska using painted tire tracks and systematic risk assessment, eventually founding Reeve Aleutian Airways.
In 1911, Cal Rodgers flew a grape-soda-sponsored biplane from Brooklyn to the Pacific in 84 days, surviving 15+ crashes to complete the first transcontinental flight in history.
Before crossing the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh spent years as a barnstorming wing walker - the unforgiving apprenticeship that built the most famous pilot in history.
Frank Luke destroyed 18 enemy observation balloons and aircraft in 17 days of WWI combat, becoming America's deadliest and most feared pilot over the Western Front.
Hurricane R4118 is the only Battle of Britain combat veteran still airworthy - found in a field in India after decades and restored to flight in 2004.
On October 9, 1937, American aviator Jimmy Angel landed his Flamingo monoplane atop Venezuela's Auyán-tepui mesa - and couldn't get it back off for 33 years.
The Bristol Beaufighter was WWII's radar-equipped night hunter - combining airborne interception technology with devastating firepower to change the mathematics of nocturnal air war.
The de Havilland Mosquito outran German fighters, flew on wood instead of aluminum, and became the most versatile combat aircraft of World War II.
The Dornier Do 335 Pfeil was the fastest piston fighter of World War II, and the only complete example survives at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center.
The Gee Bee Model R set a world speed record of 252 mph at the 1932 National Air Races - and claimed the lives of nearly everyone else who flew it at the limit.
The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was the most distinctive American fighter of WWII - a twin-boomed, twin-engined design that dominated the Pacific and carried America's top ace to 40 kills.
On January 1, 1929, five Army Air Corps airmen flew a Fokker trimotor over Southern California for 150 hours to prove aerial refueling could transform military airpower.
Bessie Coleman became the first African American and first person of Native American descent to earn an international pilot's license in 1921, after learning to fly in France when every U.S. flight school refused her.
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X-1 with two cracked ribs and a piece of broomstick - a story of calculated risk and cold nerve.