Pilot and engineer Richard Grace and his team are restoring a unique survivor of the Spitfire's rarest mark from 75-year-old wreckage, salvaged from a Belgium scrapyard.
During the Vietnam War an elite team of pilots braved terrifying odds by flying unarmed light aircraft over enemy troops to mark targets for America's supersonic strike planes. Now, British airline pilot Shona Bowman is determined to return one of their planes to the sky, but the battered Cessna Bird Dog she bought for £10,000 turns out not to be the bargain it first appeared. Featuring recently rediscovered tapes of combat missions over Vietnam recorded by the pilots themselves.
Restorers recreate the legendary Fokker DXXI – a Dutch plane that took on Hitler’s Luftwaffe and shot down hundreds of enemy aircraft.
Intrepid pilot Taff Smith rescues a Bucker Jungmeister, a relic of General Franco’s fascist air force which brought civil war to Spain.
On Lake Windermere a restoration team is determined to recreate the first flight of Britain's first seaplane. In 1911, Winston Churchill personally championed the Waterbird to give the Royal Navy an eye in the sky ahead of the First World War. However, putting Edwardian technology into the air proves to be harder than anyone expected.
A 1930s Lockheed airliner used by MI6 to spy on pre-war Germany is restored to flight by engineer Richard Grace and his team. To the suspicious Gestapo security men who checked his documents and searched his plane, maverick Australian pilot Sidney Cotton was on a business trip to promote his film business. In reality, he was Britain's most audacious spy, photographing Hitler's military secrets from the air - and on one occasion, with a Nazi general in the cockpit. The restoration reveals tell-tale signs of the plane's top-secret past.
The second series of the show that follows the skilled engineers and brave pilots who are on a mission to return history-writing planes to the air. In hangars and workshops across the UK. A rare Spitfire that escorted American daylight bombers over occupied Europe in 1945 is prepared for a new mission. Its home, the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire, faces financial difficulties - and engineers maintaining Britain's biggest fleet of flying vintage aircraft believe their iconic fighter can spearhead a recovery, if it can be returned to the sky in time.
Engineer and pilot Richard Grace and his team fight to complete an epic 40-year project to return the RAF's fastest wartime fighter to the sky. The Hawker Tempest could reach about 500mph, but it weighs six tons and it's so complex that missing parts have to be recreated by hand. Then Richard must find someone who's prepared to fly a fire-breathing 3,000-horsepower monster.
Following the restoration of a Spitfire that was discovered as an unlikely plaything in a children's playground. The TE517 was built to fight Hitler but then became a pawn in the Cold War, before ending up in the Middle East. Engineers at Biggin Hill in Kent are determined to return her to the air and proudly restore her to her original markings as a member of one of the RAF's legendary Free Czech squadrons.
Engineers fight to prepare a squadron of 10 Spitfires for Britain's biggest warbird air display in years, along with Corsairs, Hurricanes and Mustangs and a dozen more rare warbirds. Technical boss Martin Espin and his team must fault-find and repair against the clock, while display mastermind Jane Larcombe juggles the logistics of an event that involves a small air force and thousands of fans.
Eighty years after it crashed in flames during the Battle of Britain, a rare Spitfire is reconstructed from a wreckage dug from the soil of the South Downs. The mission for modern engineers at the Biggin Hill Heritage Hangar is to make P9372 fly again. In doing so, they honour the pilots of the RAF's most flamboyant fighter squadron whose social life was almost as legendary as their aerial exploits.
At 100-years-old, David Berry is one of the last surviving wartime airmen who flew the fragile Fairey Swordfish biplane, which helped sink Hitler's Bismarck battleship. Now engineers from the charity Navy Wings are fighting to return a rare example of the Royal Navy's last biplane to the sky in time for David to see it. At the same time, 250 miles away, another team are determined to make the US Navy's last biplane fly again.
