TV Guide Smithsonian

The Japanese's island-hopping campaign continues as they fight for control of Okinawa; Indonesians are freed from Japanese control by Australians.

When the casualty of U.S. soldiers begins to mount, President Truman is forced to take drastic measures to bring the Pacific War to an end.

Narrators Beau Weaver and Bob Naughton tell the story of the North American F-100 Super Sabre and how it became a sonic powerhouse after some difficulties.

The Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk became the U.S. Army's go-to helicopter for delivering troops to and from the battlefront in 1979 after years of development.

The history of how the C-47 went from a passenger plane to a gunship in Vietnam.

Stories of aerial combat include tales of dangerous fights that took place over Nazi occupied Germany with P-38 Lightning and Messerschmitts aircrafts.

With prominent Civil War and Revolutionary War landmarks as well as Sullivan Island, the point of entry for slaves, the Palmetto State is full of history.

A road trip in the air soars above the Oregon Trail, the fields of Gettysburg, Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon and other popular sightseeing destinations.

An aerial tour of New England passes over the Massachusetts harbors where America's first acts of rebellion took place and the pristine lakes on Maine's border.

An aerial tour of the state in which Abraham Lincoln became a man includes the stories of the 1871 Great Fire of Chicago and the 20th-century Great Migration.

An aerial view of the fourth largest metropolis in America is presented as the history and landmarks in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex are explored.

An aerial tour of John Wayne's home state reveals farmhouses, barns, towering silos, rows of crops for miles and a county known for its covered bridges.

New York City is referred to as "the city that never sleeps," and an aerial tour over the five boroughs at night shows man-made and natural wonders.

A regional airliner crashed as it was trying to land at Zurich, Switzerland, and it was determined that the captain went below the minimum descent altitude.

Examining near-fatal accidents caused by engine failures.

A small jet taxis in front of a large airliner and is destroyed, and the airliner tries to take off in spite of having lost an engine, but it cannot fly.

The pilots of a DC-9 leaving Huntsville, Alabama fly into a thunderstorm and encounter hail that breaks the plane's windshield and kills both engines.

In 2005, a 1947 flying boat carrying passengers from Fort Lauderdale, Florida to the Bahamas lost its right wing and plunged into the ocean near Miami Beach.

In 1992 an Airbus A320 struck a mountain as it was circling a French airport, and a pilot's misreading of the autopilot controls was assigned partial blame.

A Boeing 737 crashes while approaching the runway in bad weather at a remote Inuit village in the Northwest Territories, and three people survive.

Three hundred people are killed in one of the deadliest aviation accidents of all time after a fire breaks out on board Saudia Flight 163.

The interface between the flight crew and the airplane's onboard avionics can go wrong in a variety of ways, including instrument failure and pilot error.

A community experiences terror after witnessing a horrifying mid-air tragedy and flaming debris rains down on them.

On April 29, 2013, National Airlines Flight 102 crashed just moments after taking off from Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan, killing all seven people on board.

In Ireland in 2011, a commuter airplane flying from Belfast to Cork makes two failed attempts to land in dense fog at Cork and crashes on its third try.

Investigators when they learn Alaska Airline Flight 261, American Eagle Flight 4184 and United Airlines Flight 585 went down due to pitch problems.

When basketball legend Kobe Bryant is killed in a helicopter crash in Los Angeles, investigators look for clues amid a global outpouring of grief.

As an ATR 72 flew a holding pattern over Chicago in freezing rain, ice that had built up on its wings prevented its controls from working, causing a crash.

A plane of an airline linking the islands of French Polynesia leaves Moorea Island for Tahiti, but two minutes out it suddenly dives into the ocean.

In November 2003, insurgents in Iraq fire at an air freighter owned by European Air Transport; the hit takes out its hydraulics and sets its left wing ablaze.