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 the night of May 16, 1943, RAF 617 Squadron flew modified Lancasters at 60 feet above water in complete darkness to breach the Ruhr Valley dams using Barnes Wallis's revolutionary bouncing bomb.
On October 27, 1962, Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson died flying a U-2 over Cuba - his mission produced the intelligence that gave Kennedy the leverage to end the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The Convair B-36 Peacemaker was the most powerful piston-engine bomber ever built - ten engines, a 230-foot wingspan, and a nuclear deterrent mission it never had to execute.
The Douglas DC-3 transformed commercial aviation in 1936 by becoming the first airliner to turn a profit on passengers alone - and it is still flying today.
The American Volunteer Group flew secondhand P-40s against Japan's best over Burma with tactics the U.S. Army had refused to adopt - and changed the course of the air war in China.
In April 1945, American fighter pilot Bob Hoover escaped a German POW camp by stealing an abandoned Focke-Wulf 190 and flying it to liberated Holland - in an aircraft he had never flown before.
In 1911, Cal Rodgers became the first person to fly coast to coast across America, covering 4,231 miles in 84 days aboard a grape-soda-sponsored Wright biplane.
On December 14, 1986, Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager became the first people to fly around the world nonstop and unrefueled, closing the final chapter of aviation's first century.
Doc the B-29 Superfortress returned to flight on July 17, 2016, after 350,000 volunteer hours and 16 years of restoration work in Wichita, Kansas.
Jack Northrop's flying wing was cancelled, bulldozed, and buried in 1949 - then vindicated 40 years later when the B-2 Spirit flew with an identical 172-foot wingspan.
How Nate Saint's aerial bucket drop technique and Operation Auca changed the Ecuadorian Amazon and the history of missionary aviation in 1956.
Before the Spirit of St. Louis, Charles Lindbergh spent two years barnstorming the Midwest in a surplus Curtiss Jenny, earning two dollars a ride and building the instincts that would cross the Atlantic.
On August 7, 1955, Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston rolled the Dash 80 prototype twice over Lake Washington - a calculated maneuver that helped launch the commercial jet age.
When the Fw 190 appeared over the English Channel in 1941, it outclassed Britain's best fighters - until a German pilot's wrong turn handed the RAF an intact example.
How an all-female Soviet regiment flying a 1927 biplane trainer flew 30,000 combat sorties and became the most feared unit on the Eastern Front.
The P-51 Mustang was designed in 117 days, nearly sidelined by the wrong engine, then transformed by one question from a British test pilot into the fighter that won the air war over Europe.
The XB-70 Valkyrie was America's Mach 3 strategic bomber, made obsolete by ICBMs before it flew its mission - its sole survivor stands today at the NMUSAF in Dayton, Ohio.
Harold Gillam saved five lives crash-landing his ice-crippled Pilgrim 100B on Porcher Island in January 1943 - then died alone trying to bring them rescue.
On September 24, 1929, Jimmy Doolittle completed the first fully blind flight at Mitchel Field, establishing the foundation of instrument flight still practiced today.
On January 2, 1967, Colonel Robin Olds led 48 F-4 Phantoms disguised as F-105 strike aircraft into an ambush that downed 7 MiG-21s without a single American loss.