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.
Don Sheldon flew glacier operations out of Talkeetna for two decades, building a round stone hut at 5,800 feet on the Ruth Glacier that still stands on the National Register of Historic Places.
Pancho Barnes broke Amelia Earhart's airspeed record in 1930, then built the desert ranch that became the unofficial social center of America's most consequential test flight program.
Major Richard Bong - America's Ace of Aces with 40 aerial victories in WWII - died in a jet test flight accident on August 6, 1945, the same day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.
The Convair B-36 Peacemaker was the most powerful piston-engine bomber ever built - and it kept the peace by being too formidable for the Soviet Union to challenge.
The 1927 Dole Air Derby sent eight planes from Oakland to Hawaii; only two finished, ten people died, and it reshaped how aviation approached oceanic flight.
The Memphis Belle's 17-year, 55,000-hour restoration at Wright-Patterson ended with a May 17, 2018 unveiling - 75 years to the day after her final mission.
The 588th Night Bomber Aviation Regiment - the 'Night Witches' - flew roughly 30,000 combat sorties against the Wehrmacht using obsolete canvas biplanes with no radar, armor, or parachutes.
Reginald Mitchell designed the Supermarine Spitfire while dying of cancer, and died in 1937 at 42 - before his aircraft ever defended Britain.
On the night of May 16–17, 1943, nineteen Lancaster bombers flew at sixty feet over German reservoirs to destroy the Ruhr dams with a weapon that defied conventional logic.
In April 1945, Bob Hoover escaped a German POW camp, stole a Focke-Wulf 190 he'd never flown, and landed it in the Netherlands.
How Wisconsin barnstormer Bob Reeve pioneered glacier flying from a Valdez mud flat and built one of Alaska's most enduring airlines.
On October 21, 1928, seventeen-year-old Elinor Smith flew under all four East River bridges solo, becoming one of aviation's most skilled and overlooked record-setters.
A P-38 Lightning recovered from 268 feet of Greenland glacier ice, Glacier Girl flew again on October 26, 2002, sixty years after her emergency landing.
Operation Tidal Wave's low-level raid on Ploesti earned five Medals of Honor in a single mission - a record that still stands in American military aviation.
Robert Timm and John Cook set an unbroken 64-day piston aircraft endurance record in a Cessna 172 over Nevada in 1958–59.
On August 7, 1955, Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston barrel-rolled the 707 prototype twice over Lake Washington - and sold the jet age in the process.
The Gee Bee Model R was the most extreme piston-engine racer of the 1930s, built by five brothers in Springfield, MA, and flown to a 252 mph world record.
The Grumman F6F Hellcat achieved a 19:1 kill ratio against Japanese aircraft and dismantled Japan's naval air power in under two years of Pacific combat.
The Sikorsky VS-300's first tethered flight on September 14, 1939 established the single-rotor design that still dominates helicopter aviation today.
On October 30, 1961, Soviet Major Andrei Durnovtsev flew the most dangerous weapons delivery mission in aviation history, dropping the 50-megaton Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya.