The Red Tail has been in the news..

Workday Minnesota, February 8, 2008
Butter City, TV Interview , Spring 2007
Screen Magazine, March 2006
Interviews with Ronald Lewis, March 2, 2006
Pioneer Press, January 1, 2006
Detroit Free Press, December 19, 2005

Find out about the creators of The Red Tail...



At two years old Melissa lived in a stable working-class family in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her father Roy, an airline mechanic, had moved his wife and two children from out east for a job with Northwest Airlines. He was the envy of his blue-collar buddies and justifiably so. After all, at that time everyone in the airline business knew that Northwest was the place to be for an aircraft mechanic.

By the time Melissa and her sister Sara began preparing for college, Northwest was showing signs of stress. And Northwest workers were not alone. Many working-class families like the Koch’s fell victim to the new corporate standard of mergers, acquisitions and global outsourcing. Roy, like so many American workers, was finding out that the faith and loyalty he invested in his company would not be reciprocated.

Roy worked on aircraft for 38 years, 23 of them with Northwest Airlines. Then, in August 2005, struggling with yet another wave of layoffs and corporate betrayal, Roy and his fellow mechanics made the painful choice to strike.

Exhilarated by the power of the strike and believing that the strikers were making history, Melissa borrows a camera and sets out to document their triumph. Thus begins Melissa’s struggle to justify the mechanics’ sacrifice, and to find out what the future holds for all of us.

Ultimately, Melissa and her family take a journey to meet face to face the people currently holding outsourced aircraft mechanic jobs in China and the southern U.S.. Melissa’s search exposes the ways in which globalization touches real people, families and communities. What will she find beyond the board room and the picket line? And what hope is left for the dwindling working class in America?



In August of 2005 the mechanics at Northwest Airlines went on strike. Soon after, an anonymous flight attendant quit her job rather than cross the picket line. Disillusioned and inspired, this woman went in search of an established documentary filmmaker to tell the story of the workers of NWA. A story that was neglected by the mainstream media. This search lead her to award-winning filmmaker Dawn Mikkelson. Moved by this flight attendant’s passion and seeing the global implications of this story, Mikkelson began filming what was to become The Red Tail. Simultaneously the daughter of a striking mechanic, Melissa Koch, dropped everything when her father joined the NWA picket line. Armed with a small home video camera, Koch had unparalleled access to the human struggle of the mechanics during the early days of their strike. It didn’t take long for these two documentary teams to discover one another and join together as one. Since that time, the team has grown to include Chris Waller (Producer/Writer), Lori Barbero (Music Supervisor), Adrian Danciu (Director of Photography), and Carly Zuckweiler (Sound Designer). As synergy around this project builds, so does the passion and commitment of this team.