About
Storied Aviation
Every aircraft has a story.
Some are written in logbooks and history books. Others are carried by the people who designed, built, maintained and flew an aircraft—or simply stood beside one and wondered what it would be like to leave the ground.
Storied Aviation was created to find and preserve those stories.
Through photography, historical research, and conversations with the people of aviation, Storied Aviation explores the connections between aircraft and the people whose lives intersect with them.
Sometimes that means climbing aboard an airplane that carried young men into war and discovering something about the people who once sat inside it. Sometimes it means finding the name on a small plaque beneath an empty seat and asking who that person was.
But aviation history isn’t only something that happened generations ago.
It is the student pilot climbing from an airplane after a first solo. The retired corporate pilot who spent a career crossing the country and now gives his time to keeping an old airplane flying. It is the mechanic working late in a hangar, the restorer bringing an aircraft back from pieces, the photographer standing beside a runway, or the child at an airport fence watching one lift into the sky for the first time.
There are stories in military aviation and general aviation, in airliners and corporate aircraft, at grass strips and major airports, in museum hangars and working maintenance shops. Some changed the course of history. Others changed the course of a life.
Both are worth telling.
AVIATION • HISTORY • PEOPLE
Storied Aviation tells the story of aviation through its aircraft, history, and people.
Tim Fegan
I’m a photographer and writer with a lifelong fascination for aviation, history, and the stories that connect them.
Storied Aviation grew from a simple realization: photographing an aircraft often raises more questions than it answers.
Who flew it? Where has it been? Why was it built? Who keeps it flying today? And what does this airplane mean to the person standing beside it?
Those questions can lead eighty years into the past—or to something that happened on a runway yesterday.
Photography gives me a reason to look more closely. Curiosity gives me a reason to ask another question. And the people I meet along the way often provide the story I never knew I was looking for.
The photograph may be where the discovery begins.
The story is what makes it matter.