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.
On January 2, 1967, Colonel Robin Olds destroyed seven MiG-21s - roughly a third of North Vietnam's fleet - using a deception that made F-4 Phantoms look exactly like F-105 Thunderchiefs.
Roscoe Turner won the Thompson Trophy Race three times - in 1934, 1938, and 1939 - making him the most decorated pilot of America's golden age of air racing.
The Douglas DC-3, born from a 2 AM phone call in 1934, became the first airliner to profit on passengers alone and still flies revenue routes today.
The Hawker Hurricane destroyed more Luftwaffe aircraft than any other fighter in the Battle of Britain, yet history has largely overlooked it in favor of the Spitfire.
The Hughes H-4 Hercules flew once for 26 seconds in 1947 yet held the record for the largest aircraft wingspan for 72 years - here's the full story.
John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew nonstop across the Atlantic in June 1919 - eight years before Lindbergh - in a converted WWI bomber.
Bessie Coleman became the world's first Black female pilot in 1921 after crossing the Atlantic when every American flight school turned her away.
Bob Hoover escaped a German POW camp in 1945 by stealing a Focke-Wulf 190, then built a career so extraordinary that Neil Armstrong named him the greatest aviator who ever lived.
On December 14, 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager completed the first nonstop, unrefueled circumnavigation of the Earth in Voyager, covering 24,986 miles in 9 days.
Don Sheldon spent 30 years mastering glacier flying from Talkeetna, Alaska, transforming Denali from an unreachable wilderness into an accessible expedition destination.
Glacier Girl, a P-38 Lightning buried under 268 feet of Greenland ice since 1942, was excavated, restored, and returned to flight on October 26, 2002.
Operation Tidal Wave on August 1, 1943 sent 177 B-24 Liberators against Nazi-controlled oil refineries at 200 feet, earning five Medals of Honor in a single mission.
On April 18, 1943, sixteen P-38 Lightnings flew 435 miles in radio silence to ambush Admiral Yamamoto using decoded Japanese communications - and nearly exposed America's greatest intelligence secret.
On August 7, 1955, Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston barrel-rolled the company's $200M prototype jet transport twice over Lake Washington - a calculated act that helped sell the jet age.
The Curtiss JN-4 Jenny cost as little as $200 at post-WWI surplus sales, putting an entire generation of veterans in the air and launching the barnstorming era.
How a crashed Zero on an Alaskan island gave American engineers the precise intelligence needed to design the F6F Hellcat, the fighter that won the Pacific air war.
The XB-70 Valkyrie was America's Mach 3 strategic bomber that never flew in combat - its engineering legacy reshaped high-speed aviation for decades.
The Schneider Trophy seaplane races of 1913–1931 were the engineering crucible that produced the Supermarine Spitfire and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine.
Bob Reeve pioneered glacier landings in Alaska's Wrangell Mountains in 1932, turning frozen runways into supply lines and eventually founding Reeve Aleutian Airways.
On October 14, 1947, Chuck Yeager piloted the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis to Mach 1.06 over the Mojave Desert, becoming the first person confirmed to break the sound barrier.