Which story should SFL Productions tell next?

MiG Alley, 1952. Robbie Risner of the 336th finds a MiG-15 that will not disengage. The man in the other cockpit, almost certainly a Soviet instructor, the kind American pilots call a honcho, is the best he will ever meet. What follows isn't a dogfight. It's an interrogation: scissors, rolls, reversals, both jets bleeding energy and altitude until they're down on the deck near the speed of sound, threading a dry riverbed with dust boiling up behind them.

Then the honcho runs for the border, and Risner does the thing he is not supposed to do. He follows, across the Yalu, thirty-five miles into China, down onto an enemy airfield, and finishes it on the runway. He never learned the other man's name.

Austria, July 1944. Arthur Fiedler is escorting bombers deep into the Reich when the formation is jumped. He latches onto an Fw 190. The German doesn't turn and fight, he rolls over and dives for the Alps, betting his life that terrain will do what guns cannot. Fiedler follows him down.

What happens next happens between rock walls: two fighters threading an Alpine valley below the ridgelines, the German using the mountain itself as a weapon. Every turn is a stall or a rock face. It ends on the valley floor. Painted on the nose of Fiedler's Mustang, the whole way down that canyon, is his wife's name.

Germany, May 1944. Bud Anderson is escorting bombers when he meets a Luftwaffe pilot as aggressive as he is. There is no slashing pass and no run for home, both men commit. The two aircraft stop trying to out-turn each other and start trading airspeed for altitude, climbing, each pilot betting he can hold controlled flight one second longer than the other.

It is the purest test in air combat: who understands the energy in his own aircraft well enough to spend the last of it at exactly the right moment. At the top of the climb, Anderson still has something left. The 109 does not. Anderson died in 2024 at 102, the last of America's Second World War triple aces.