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.
Flak Bait, the most battle-damaged American bomber to survive WWII, flew 207 missions and took over 1,000 flak holes before its painstaking Smithsonian restoration.
On June 5, 1944, over 800 C-47 crews flew paratroopers into Normandy through flak and cloud, launching the D-Day invasion.
Noel Wien's 1924 flight from Anchorage to Fairbanks in an open-cockpit biplane changed Alaska forever.
The 1952 Farnborough airshow disaster killed 31 people and fundamentally changed how every airshow in the world manages spectator safety.
On June 4, 1783, the Montgolfier brothers launched the first public hot air balloon flight in Annonay, France, launching the age of human flight.
How Eddie Rickenbacker, America's WWI Ace of Aces, survived 24 days adrift in the Pacific in 1942.
The 1962 crash of Air France Flight 007 at Orly killed 130 people, including 106 Atlanta art patrons, and reshaped a city's cultural identity.
On June 2, 1910, Charles Rolls completed the first nonstop round-trip flight across the English Channel - and died flying 39 days later.
Bill Stead, a Nevada cattle rancher and pilot, single-handedly revived American air racing by founding the Reno Air Races in 1964.
The Focke-Wulf 190 first flew on June 1, 1939, and became one of WWII's most feared fighters thanks to Kurt Tank's radical radial-engine design.
Wilbur Wright, the quiet genius behind powered flight, died of typhoid fever on May 30, 1912, at just forty-five years old.
The midnight demolition of Chicago's Meigs Field in 2003 remains general aviation's most brazen political attack on a public-use airport.
How 1,400 shipyard workers repaired USS Yorktown in 72 hours, giving the Navy the third carrier that won the Battle of Midway.
On May 28, 1940, RAF fighters fought and died over Dunkirk in battles the soldiers below never saw.
On May 27, 1958, the McDonnell F-4 Phantom made its first flight - an unwanted jet that became the defining fighter of a generation.
The 1945 Gremlin Special crash in New Guinea's hidden Baliem Valley led to one of WWII's most daring rescues using glider snatch recovery.
How sixteen P-38 Lightnings flew 400 miles at wave-top height to intercept and kill Admiral Yamamoto in 1943.
How volunteers rescued the B-29 Fifi from a Navy bombing range and restored her to flying condition against impossible odds.
On May 26, 1970, the Tupolev Tu-144 became the first commercial transport aircraft to reach Mach 2, a milestone in the Cold War supersonic race.
How a crashed Japanese Zero in Alaska's Aleutian Islands gave Grumman the intelligence to build the F6F Hellcat and turn the Pacific air war.