Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: what's the longest flight, continuous flight you've ever taken in
Speaker 1: your life? In reality or in my mind? Well, that's
Speaker 1: that's both, okay, I don't know. Nine hours yeah, to London,
Speaker 1: I believe, and in my mind I've been on a
Speaker 1: hot air balloon journey for a while. Yeah, yeah, well
Speaker 1: that's the hot air balloon journey sounds a lot more
Speaker 1: romantic and a lot a lot smoother. I mean, you're
Speaker 1: just gliding. You're up there in a basket. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: there's a second basket that might have, you know, some
Speaker 1: nice bread in it or something, and a panda bear
Speaker 1: to keep me company. And well that out it sounds
Speaker 1: really dangerous. You're gonna be mauled and you're gonna have
Speaker 1: to jump half laid for your life storybook panda Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: talks and stuff of course, what about you? Um, definitely
Speaker 1: my flights to Asia either. And I the thing is
Speaker 1: like once the once a flight is long enough, it
Speaker 1: becomes eternally long it becomes long in a way that
Speaker 1: ours can't really measure it, so counting in um both
Speaker 1: the length of the flight and the uh the factors
Speaker 1: of the flight, I would say the flight home from
Speaker 1: China with my son and my wife, that was say
Speaker 1: so that was that was the longest plane, right, I've
Speaker 1: ever been on. But in this episode titled up in
Speaker 1: the Air, we're gonna be talking about other lengthy flights,
Speaker 1: lengthy flights by humans, lengthy flights by birds, lengthy flights
Speaker 1: by robots. And I was really astounded by some of
Speaker 1: the information we're going to discuss in this episode because
Speaker 1: some of this I was already familiar with. I was
Speaker 1: new about some of the records, some of the technology,
Speaker 1: but other things just completely came out a left field
Speaker 1: for me. Yeah, and I think this is one of
Speaker 1: those topics that's always gonna be fascinating to us because
Speaker 1: we would all like the hour of flight, and we've
Speaker 1: been trying to attain it from time memorial. And I
Speaker 1: was actually thinking about a later example, but again a
Speaker 1: hot air balloon example of the moncal Fhier brothers who
Speaker 1: created the first hot air balloon, and I thought, Ah,
Speaker 1: if only I could go back in time to September
Speaker 1: nineteen three, two first Sigh, where one of these hot
Speaker 1: air balloons carried a sheep, a rooster, and a duck
Speaker 1: and flew for eight minutes in front of Louis the
Speaker 1: sixteenth Marine Antoinette and of course the French court. I
Speaker 1: mean that must have seemed like just alchemy and and
Speaker 1: all sorts of magic. Well to the people under the sheep.
Speaker 1: But I bet the rooster and the duck we're probably
Speaker 1: not as impressed, because they're like, all right, oh flight,
Speaker 1: oh great, even invented flight. That's great humans. Because but
Speaker 1: back to your point, humans have always obviously craved flight.
Speaker 1: We've we've we've stood there, we've invented things, we've we've
Speaker 1: made weapons and tools, and then we look up and
Speaker 1: the birds are flying all overhead, and we're like, I
Speaker 1: want that too. Feels like nothing, all those intentions feel
Speaker 1: like zero. And for ages and ages and ages that
Speaker 1: was forbiddness. We might try to strap together some sort
Speaker 1: of wingsuit, and then we'd fall off a cliff and
Speaker 1: die or hardly injure ourselves. And and and we and
Speaker 1: we just can't help but envy those birds. Um, there's
Speaker 1: a great YouTube clip that's been going around recently up
Speaker 1: and it's it's I believe it's a European and Russian
Speaker 1: origin where someone's just turning their camera out the window
Speaker 1: and they're they're filming this crow. We've discussed crows before,
Speaker 1: highly intelligent birds tool users. And this bird is taking
Speaker 1: like a a little dish or a lens cap or something,
Speaker 1: and it's on the slanted roof covered with snow, and
Speaker 1: it will take this little, uh, this little makeshift sled
Speaker 1: up to the top and it will ride the sled
Speaker 1: down and then it'll drag it back up and write
Speaker 1: it down again. And I was talking to my wife
Speaker 1: about this, and she she's like, she says, well, why
Speaker 1: is this crow doing this? Like, doesn't crow know that
Speaker 1: he can fly? He's here, he is wasting his time sledding,
Speaker 1: and sledding is the thing we do as as land
Speaker 1: based creatures to try and just get a tape east
Speaker 1: of what it might be to fly. I think that
Speaker 1: crow is just throwing it in our faces. Right, not
Speaker 1: only can I fly, but I can slid? I think
Speaker 1: so too. All right, let's look at some of these
Speaker 1: showoffs in the animal world here. Yeah, because it's Again,
Speaker 1: it's one thing to say, all right, birds can fly, obviously,
Speaker 1: but how long can they fly? How how long can
Speaker 1: they keep their feet up off the ground? How long
Speaker 1: can they just exist in that that that nether world
Speaker 1: between solid surface and in the sky and exceedingly long time.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna look at the Alpine swift. This is
Speaker 1: a small bird each way, it's less than a quarter
Speaker 1: of a pound, and they spend the summer breeding in
Speaker 1: Europe and they migrate to Africa for the winter thousands
Speaker 1: of miles away. Yeah, the Alpine swift is pretty crazy
Speaker 1: because we're talking about a one thousand, two forty mile
Speaker 1: flight carried out by three Alpine swifts. Longest recorded flight
Speaker 1: made by any bird, uh recently tracked. I want to
Speaker 1: use two hundred days in the air no stop. It
Speaker 1: seems it seems like it was a NonStop flight. Um.
Speaker 1: The reason we know this is that there is a
Speaker 1: team of scientists who strapped tiny electronic monitoring devices to
Speaker 1: six alpine swifts before they flew south for the winter.
Speaker 1: They recaptured three of them and they looked at this
Speaker 1: data and they were astounded. Now, the thing about this
Speaker 1: is that these tags only collect data every four minutes,
Speaker 1: So it's impossible to rule out the chance that they
Speaker 1: touched down occasionally, but every single one of the data
Speaker 1: points collected for more than six months in a row
Speaker 1: indicated that at the time they were either actively flying
Speaker 1: or gliding in the air. Yeah. The gliding is key,
Speaker 1: because that's basically what they're doing, uh, instead of resting
Speaker 1: at night, based on the data, they're gliding, and then
Speaker 1: they're they're eating and drinking in the air as well,
Speaker 1: presumably according at the Swiss research. Yeah, this is so cool.
Speaker 1: They were making meals of airborne playing them bugs and
Speaker 1: spiders swept into the sky by high winds, and then
Speaker 1: they slaked their thirst by just skimming the water in
Speaker 1: rivers and oceans. I mean, that's that's eating on the
Speaker 1: run there. Yeah, I've I have run across the information
Speaker 1: about the number of insects that you will have swept
Speaker 1: up and had rather high altitudes before, but I had
Speaker 1: not really put one and two together that, oh there
Speaker 1: might be birds coming through that can not only snack
Speaker 1: on that, but depend on it during a very long
Speaker 1: distance flight. Yeah, I mean that is fast food for
Speaker 1: that animal. Now, another bird that deserves mentioned here is
Speaker 1: the bar tailed Godwit just because the sheer distance involved here. Uh.
Speaker 1: In two thousand seven, a female god with was found
Speaker 1: to have flown seven thousand miles or eleven thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred kilometers NonStop from Alaska to New Zealand. So that's
Speaker 1: without taking a break for food or drink yep, and
Speaker 1: that is in just nine days. The US Geological Survey
Speaker 1: and pr BO Conservation Science they outfitted sixteen of these
Speaker 1: birds with satellite transmitters to study god with migration, trying
Speaker 1: to figure out exactly how long they were out there. Now,
Speaker 1: one of these birds, which they easy It flew six
Speaker 1: thousand forty miles directly to UH, this wetland area on
Speaker 1: the border of North Korea and China. So there it
Speaker 1: touches down, has a very brief rest, and then continues
Speaker 1: the remaining three thousand miles to Alaska. But then the
Speaker 1: return trip NonStop UH seven thousand miles fly to New
Speaker 1: Zealand uninterrupted. Now she she benefited from tail winds on
Speaker 1: that and UH. And of course you want to about
Speaker 1: the sleep, like, how do you possibly get any rest? Well,
Speaker 1: this comes back to an old topic of discussed before
Speaker 1: Uni him is spheric sleep. You dare not put the
Speaker 1: whole brain to rest for the night because you are flying,
Speaker 1: just put half of it to rest, right, And and
Speaker 1: they found out that she burned up huge stores of fat,
Speaker 1: more than fifty of her body weight that she had
Speaker 1: piled on at the start of her journey in Alaska.
Speaker 1: So it's be prepared to not rest, and be be
Speaker 1: prepared to sleep one half of the mind at a time,
Speaker 1: and be prepared to lose a lot of weight. Indeed, now,
Speaker 1: the reason they wanted to look at this is because
Speaker 1: the uh the Godwit migration has decreased from the mid
Speaker 1: nineties from one hundred and fifty thousand birds a year
Speaker 1: to seventy thousands. So it's thought that development along the
Speaker 1: Yellow Sea between China and North and South Korea is
Speaker 1: depriving the birds of vital food sources since those mud
Speaker 1: flats and wetlands are drained for development. And this is huge.
Speaker 1: It's wiped out half the population. So examples like that
Speaker 1: are are amazing. And also again that it's it's another
Speaker 1: case where we kind of look at the example of
Speaker 1: the bird and and it kind of makes us a
Speaker 1: little jealous because even even other examples of birds that
Speaker 1: just flies off for the winter. Uh you look at
Speaker 1: I mean, you might be a person who realizes, hey,
Speaker 1: I've never left the state, I've never left the city,
Speaker 1: or I've certainly never left this country of this hemisphere.
Speaker 1: And here's a bird, just a stupid old bird, and
Speaker 1: it's doing it every year, or smart old birds or
Speaker 1: a smart, smart old bird. But but they're probably being
Speaker 1: a little judge, you know, you think, is that why
Speaker 1: they're always trying to to squirt their guana on our heads? Oh,
Speaker 1: the people are being judge that the birds they're not.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Are you implying that the people who
Speaker 1: hate words are always trying to Yeah, you don't see
Speaker 1: them like just off of ledges where they're going on.
Speaker 1: There you go. On that note, let's take a break.
Speaker 1: When we get back, we're going to talk about how
Speaker 1: humans have tried to engineer your own crazy length of cliffe.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, and we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the longest human flight on record. And i'd like to
Speaker 1: think about the next example is really trying to embrace
Speaker 1: our spirit animal by naming this airship the snowbird. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're talking about the ZPG two airship Snowbird. Uh, and
Speaker 1: this was back in when the ZPG two airship took
Speaker 1: off from South Weymouth near Boston, Massachusetts, under the command
Speaker 1: of Commander Jack our Hunt. And uh where did it go? Well,
Speaker 1: it went to Sunny Key West, Florida. Eleven d days
Speaker 1: later it landed there and it logged an amazing nine
Speaker 1: thousand four miles or two hundred two kilometers. We're talking
Speaker 1: about two hundred sixty four point two hours. And can
Speaker 1: you imagine how surreal it would be to be in
Speaker 1: that airship for eleven days? I I can because I
Speaker 1: have I've often seeing like images of the old the
Speaker 1: old Zeppelins particularly and where I've watched the second Indiant
Speaker 1: know it's the third Indiana Jones movie that has the
Speaker 1: you know, the neat scenes of the Zeppelin or that
Speaker 1: I think there's an old old Michael York film called
Speaker 1: Zeppelin has some some nice classy scenes as well, where
Speaker 1: it does look just instantly attractive because you're talking a
Speaker 1: very smooth ride where I mean they say that you
Speaker 1: could take an eat pin or a fountain pen and
Speaker 1: you could stand it up on the table and it
Speaker 1: would just remain there just because everything was so still
Speaker 1: and so smooth, and you're you're flying NonStop. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: fabulous castle in the sky, the closest that you probably
Speaker 1: would ever get to, like hitching a ride on a cloud. Now,
Speaker 1: in an airplane, it's gonna be harder to replicate that experience,
Speaker 1: especially if you're dealing with very long distances, um, and
Speaker 1: especially if you are crammed in with humanity. Yes. Now,
Speaker 1: in terms of commercial flights, we talked to the beginning,
Speaker 1: you know, what are the longest commercial flights we've been on.
Speaker 1: If you try to come to a book a commercial
Speaker 1: flight just for the purposes of having a really long flight,
Speaker 1: Let's say there's something really wrong with you and you
Speaker 1: you just crave an excruciating amount of time and an
Speaker 1: airplane like cycled air. Yeah, what's the most damage you
Speaker 1: could do to your psyche with one trip NonStop? Well, formally, uh,
Speaker 1: we had a real humdinger in the Newark to Singapore
Speaker 1: flight on Singapore Airlines, which was an eighteen hour, fifty
Speaker 1: minute flight that covered nine thousand five miles or fifteen thousand,
Speaker 1: three d forty five KOs. That one was cut out
Speaker 1: because it just, uh, it just wasn't It wasn't financially viable.
Speaker 1: You're talking about a lot of fuel. You're talking about
Speaker 1: a pretty stiff journey that just isn't gonna be um
Speaker 1: aplical to everybody. Yeah, and you just missed your chance
Speaker 1: because this was just in November that they stopped this service.
Speaker 1: Now you can still count on quantas though to fly
Speaker 1: you from Sydney to Dallas in fifteen hours and twenty
Speaker 1: five minutes. It's a mere eight thousand, five of the
Speaker 1: eight miles or thousand, eight hundred and four kilometers. Still
Speaker 1: a pretty hefty flight. So I would be very interested
Speaker 1: to hear from anyone who's listening to this podcast who
Speaker 1: has taken either of those flights. Or you could just
Speaker 1: get stranded on our tarmac for five hours, in which
Speaker 1: case you enter to dog time and everything is like
Speaker 1: seven times longer. That's true. Anytime you're flying commercially, you're
Speaker 1: you have to factor in all that extra time that
Speaker 1: you're spending just you know, waiting around at transfers or
Speaker 1: getting to the airport dealing with delays. Now, by the bye,
Speaker 1: the shortest flight in the world, just so you know,
Speaker 1: is between the two Orkney Islands in Scotland. This is
Speaker 1: the Westray and pop up Westray Islands just north of Scotland,
Speaker 1: and they are separated by a distance of only one
Speaker 1: point seven miles or two point seven kilometers. Operated by
Speaker 1: logan are the flight duration is officially two minutes long,
Speaker 1: but under ideal wind conditions, it can be completed in
Speaker 1: only forty seven seconds. Wow, that's pretty short. Yep. Take
Speaker 1: thirty bucks a pop. There's obviously ah no in flight service.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good. That's a good deal, isn't it. How
Speaker 1: would you do it just for the experience of skipping
Speaker 1: to another island in in a minute? Yeah? You know,
Speaker 1: I forget how long the flight was from Oahu to
Speaker 1: the Big Island in Hawaii. I did that once, and
Speaker 1: that's a I'm not dealing with a big distance there,
Speaker 1: but definitely it took more than a minute. Well, and
Speaker 1: I find those types of little puddle jumpers to be
Speaker 1: an entirely different experience for time because for me it
Speaker 1: slows down. It may only be a fifteen minute johnp
Speaker 1: but it feels like two hours, just because you're so
Speaker 1: aware of being in a tin metal can in the
Speaker 1: middle of the air exactly now with we're talking about
Speaker 1: commercial flights, So that's one area of of long distance flying.
Speaker 1: Another huge areas, of course, military flight distance, where especially
Speaker 1: when you're dealing with bombers, the idea that you you
Speaker 1: can and will have the ability to deliver um a
Speaker 1: payload to virtually anywhere on Earth. UM. So the military
Speaker 1: flight distance currently still goes to the the American B
Speaker 1: fifty two and this for this is a particular record,
Speaker 1: you have to go back to UH January seven, when
Speaker 1: three fifty two b s made a non stuff flight
Speaker 1: around the world during Operation Power Flight that's spelled al
Speaker 1: f l I t E. For some reason, I'm not
Speaker 1: sure why they went with that, but I'm not gonna
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna disagree with them because the B fifty
Speaker 1: two is are pretty impressive. In this particular UM exercise,
Speaker 1: they covered thirty nine a thousand, one hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: five kilometers or one forty five nautical miles or twenty
Speaker 1: four thousand, three hundred normal miles in forty five hours
Speaker 1: nineteen minutes. UH. There were several in flight refuelings, which
Speaker 1: of course is key. Everyone's seen this the footage of
Speaker 1: this before, where you have the refueling plane and then
Speaker 1: you have another plane being a jet fighter or a bomber,
Speaker 1: and there's this wonderful magic, almost romantic mating of the
Speaker 1: two planes. Yeah, the docking uh in in the the
Speaker 1: end of the hose if you want to call it
Speaker 1: that has has yes, call that has a has has
Speaker 1: the these wing surfaces on it to help maneuver it
Speaker 1: into place. Um, if you ever played flight simulators, you're
Speaker 1: you're very familiar with this. And so obviously that allows
Speaker 1: a plane to stay in the air longer because instead
Speaker 1: of the plane having to land for new resources, you
Speaker 1: just bring the resources up to it, very much like
Speaker 1: our bird friends who are able to eat spiders on
Speaker 1: the fly and then deal with the plankton and all.
Speaker 1: So obviously this, uh, this whole exercise was just to demonstrate, hey,
Speaker 1: we can fly atomic payloads all over the world. To
Speaker 1: put it all of this in a mode and perspective
Speaker 1: about you know, what kind of reach capacity the military
Speaker 1: has the these days. Back in two thousand eleven, B
Speaker 1: two stealth jets made twenty five hour, eleven thousand, five
Speaker 1: hundred mile bombing missions from Whiteman Air Force Base in
Speaker 1: Missouri to Libya and back again. Okay, so by today's standards,
Speaker 1: the B fifty two still stands up here. It's pretty impressive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then that's why we still the United States still uses there.
Speaker 1: It's a very tested, time tested uh UM piece of
Speaker 1: military technology, very dependable. Okay, now let's talk about longest
Speaker 1: endurance flight non refueled, and we're talking about the Routon Voyager.
Speaker 1: Nine days, three minutes and forty four seconds twenty six thousand,
Speaker 1: three hundred sixty six miles or forty two thousand, four
Speaker 1: and thirty two kilometers took place between December four in
Speaker 1: December twenty three and nineteen six. Yeah, and this is
Speaker 1: a definite third category of of human uh piloted flight records.
Speaker 1: Because we had the commercial, we had military, and then
Speaker 1: this is this isn't a whole area where people cram
Speaker 1: themselves into very uncomfortable aircraft that are that it's all
Speaker 1: about just gaming the technology as much as possible. But
Speaker 1: because the Routan Voyager essentially is someone sitting around and saying,
Speaker 1: what what would we have to build to to just
Speaker 1: push this record to the very limits. While you'd have
Speaker 1: to build something that's lightweight and is virtually a flying
Speaker 1: fuel tank, and that's what the Routan Voyager was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is sort of the flight junkie flight obsessive here,
Speaker 1: and the Routon was actually piloted by two crew members,
Speaker 1: Dick Routon and Gina Yeager, no relation to Chuck Yeager. Incidentally, interestingly,
Speaker 1: you have two icons of flight with the same less name,
Speaker 1: no relation. Although some eaglemen might say that one of
Speaker 1: them influenced the other, it's true, right so consciously and said, oh,
Speaker 1: I need to get on that. Uh. Dick's brother Bert
Speaker 1: Ruton designed the plane, and the Voyager was built in Mojave, California.
Speaker 1: It took five years to build and test the airplane
Speaker 1: before taking off on its record setting flight. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it had seventeen fuel tanks. Seventeen fuel tanks, and the
Speaker 1: pilot would have to shift fuel from tank to tank
Speaker 1: during flight to keep things even down because otherwise, you
Speaker 1: you know, you'd get lopsided. Because this is a very
Speaker 1: very balanced aircraft. Really a very beautiful aircraft. Um it looks.
Speaker 1: Do look up a picture of it because it is uh,
Speaker 1: you know, very long wings, very almost ephemeral, like you
Speaker 1: you feel like you could break it just by looking
Speaker 1: at a picture of it. It does look really delicate.
Speaker 1: And here they went on this epic flight in it um.
Speaker 1: Now some of the details of what this consisted of,
Speaker 1: what this journey consisted of, as reported in a Only
Speaker 1: Times article that came out in six Uh. It was
Speaker 1: really interesting because it really drives home just how how
Speaker 1: little human comfort factored into this, uh, this exercise, but
Speaker 1: it is an endurance flight. Uh. That they had like
Speaker 1: no room to sleep there. They had like half of
Speaker 1: an inflatable mattress that they had tried I had to
Speaker 1: create by by cutting one in half and stitching it up,
Speaker 1: but it didn't hold air. And and then this is
Speaker 1: this roar of air outside of the vehicle the whole time.
Speaker 1: And then when it comes to using the bathroom. Uh,
Speaker 1: they had like a like a cup with a straw
Speaker 1: that they were able to funnel the liquids outside of
Speaker 1: the plane. And then they had just bags for the
Speaker 1: solid waste, which they were going to throw out the
Speaker 1: plane as well, but but the one hole they had
Speaker 1: to throw it out of the bags wouldn't fit, so
Speaker 1: they just had to stay in the plane for the
Speaker 1: whole trip. Uh. And they didn't even have diaper genies
Speaker 1: back then, you know, they couldn't contain the funk with that. Oh,
Speaker 1: and then when it came to eating, they this was
Speaker 1: really fascinating to think of too. So they had they
Speaker 1: had food, but they didn't even dream that they were
Speaker 1: going to be able to heat anything up. But then
Speaker 1: during the course of the flight, they realized that this
Speaker 1: is aluminum pipe the channels warm air from the engine
Speaker 1: compartment into the cockpit to keep everything toasty. And they
Speaker 1: found that they could wrap the foil packets of food
Speaker 1: around the pipe and then wrap a towel around it
Speaker 1: for installation, and they heat the food. You know what
Speaker 1: I love about this is um going to talk about
Speaker 1: this in our next episode about creativity, but we talked
Speaker 1: about um or. We've been looking a lot about innovation
Speaker 1: and uncertainty and obsessiveness, and here is a great example.
Speaker 1: I mean, people who probably most people would have stopped
Speaker 1: halfway into the logistics of what you just described and
Speaker 1: so forget it. I'm gonna be you know, sitting around
Speaker 1: with pooh bags and you know, peeing and directing this
Speaker 1: into a straw. Yeah, And the whole time they're not
Speaker 1: they're not getting enough sleep because it's very difficult to
Speaker 1: sleep on board. So you're you're you're fighting, you're struggling
Speaker 1: to stay awake while you're you're piloting the aircraft and
Speaker 1: they're flying around the world, so you're not dealing with
Speaker 1: with consistent weather. You're, for instance, you're having to deal
Speaker 1: with a massive typhoon which they managed to avoid being
Speaker 1: destroyed by and actually benefit a little bit from the
Speaker 1: tail winds. And then they're denied airspace Overlibias, so that
Speaker 1: also means they have to have to go around that.
Speaker 1: And I mean, it was just such a colossal undertaking.
Speaker 1: It's easy to miss that if you just sort of
Speaker 1: catch the you know, in your peripheral understanding of the
Speaker 1: news story. Oh, some people build a crazy plain and
Speaker 1: they flew around the world in a big deal. No,
Speaker 1: it's it's essentially they climbed a mountain here. I remember
Speaker 1: reading something recently about how interesting it is that humans
Speaker 1: are hardwired to really take on fear and uh to
Speaker 1: try to take on that in a way that they
Speaker 1: can adapt to it as quickly as possible, and how
Speaker 1: we keep putting ourselves in situations where we can keep
Speaker 1: gravitating to the middle of our comfort and really essentially
Speaker 1: putting ourselves in discomforting positions. This is such a good
Speaker 1: example of that of how can I go out on
Speaker 1: this extreme limb, survive in it, be successful, and somehow
Speaker 1: find the stasis within it all. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's really a testament to what we can do. Now
Speaker 1: at this point, we're going to get into the longest
Speaker 1: refueled endurance flight. Now, if you're like me, because I
Speaker 1: went into the into a into answering this question without
Speaker 1: knowing the answer. So I was thinking, all right, it's
Speaker 1: gonna be on one hand, it's gonna be some endurance
Speaker 1: dudes who built some crazy playing with solar panels or something,
Speaker 1: and uh, and and that's going to be the record breaker,
Speaker 1: or I think thought more likely it's some sort of
Speaker 1: you know, it's a B fifty two or B thirty six, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, Strategic Air Command kind of mission from the
Speaker 1: Cold War where they just had some sort of bomber
Speaker 1: with the nuclear payload just up there, you know, circling
Speaker 1: the Arctic for for days and days on end. So
Speaker 1: I was prepared for either of those two possibilities. But
Speaker 1: the reality of our our longest endured endurance that refueled
Speaker 1: flight is really more mundane. Well, I actually was, Um,
Speaker 1: I thought it was more It was interesting because it
Speaker 1: was a lot about theatrics in terms of refueling. Part
Speaker 1: will get to that. But also the Vegas angle I
Speaker 1: did not realize was a part of this. Now this
Speaker 1: is the says No. One seventy two Hacienda, and this
Speaker 1: was named Hacienda after a I believe it was a
Speaker 1: hotel in Las Vegas, a sponsor the flight. So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's not uh, you know, you know, atomic power
Speaker 1: or or the championship of the human spirit solely that
Speaker 1: are that are driving this particular record, but good old
Speaker 1: fashioned capitalism and advertising. Yeah, and then this is by
Speaker 1: the way, and as we all know from from our
Speaker 1: bugsy flix, Las Vegas was really trying to establish itself
Speaker 1: as a tourist destination, so it had, of course all
Speaker 1: these sorts of things that it was pulling out. In
Speaker 1: terms of theatrics. Now we are talking about sixty four days,
Speaker 1: twenty two hours, and nineteen minutes and five seconds, more
Speaker 1: than one hundred and fifty thousand miles. So can you
Speaker 1: imagine spending two months in a Sessna and flying twenty
Speaker 1: four hours a day without even landing for fuel, Because
Speaker 1: this is key. It got fuel, but it never landed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is and this is a very unremarkable plane. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a plane, so it's remarkable. Obviously it flies, and
Speaker 1: it can fly for sixty days straight, uh with with
Speaker 1: with refueling, but it's it's very much the kind of
Speaker 1: plane that if you just went to your local airport
Speaker 1: in the fifties you would have seen normal people could
Speaker 1: potentially own this airplane. It wasn't experimental, it wasn't military,
Speaker 1: just a civilian plane. But what it did was like
Speaker 1: cert slay stuff. Um, you know in sal Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is Robert tim and John Cook. They're the ones who
Speaker 1: took off in this thing, uh, doing this promotional stunt.
Speaker 1: And uh and again that distance six times around the
Speaker 1: world is the equivalent. They didn't fly around the world.
Speaker 1: They just flew around the channel area. Um and uh
Speaker 1: and and so what are they gonna do to refuel
Speaker 1: this What can they possibly do to get more fuel
Speaker 1: in this plane on a regular basis because they're not
Speaker 1: going to get there's no air to air refueling, certainly,
Speaker 1: not not for not for a Cessna, not for for
Speaker 1: these two guys. So what they do is they end
Speaker 1: up running formations with a ground vehicle on a remote
Speaker 1: stretch of highway near blythe California. Uh So they just
Speaker 1: kind of mcgivered it. They devised a way to to
Speaker 1: to hook onto a hose and pump the fuel up
Speaker 1: into a tank that they installed on planes belly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: twice a day gallons of fuel into the belly tank,
Speaker 1: and food and water and other supplies were lifted up
Speaker 1: from the truck as well. Now, it took them several
Speaker 1: tries to get this right. So they tried it once
Speaker 1: and they had They had to bail. They tried it
Speaker 1: a second time, had to bail, third time had to bail.
Speaker 1: The fourth try proved to be the charm. But by
Speaker 1: that point, like nobody was paying attention to the pr
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, these guys are gonna try and break
Speaker 1: the endurance record again. You know who cares. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't until they've been up forty or fifty days that
Speaker 1: everyone started paying attention to them again. I'm thinking about
Speaker 1: after that point, maybe fifty days. That's when people in
Speaker 1: that general area were like, that circular white path is
Speaker 1: driving me crazy. They keep buzzing by once a day,
Speaker 1: and by some accounts, they're really kind of lucky. They
Speaker 1: didn't crash and die, because I mean the whole time
Speaker 1: like that, there are times apparently where one would wake
Speaker 1: up and find the other one dozing off the controls.
Speaker 1: They've just flown off in some random direction. I mean again,
Speaker 1: luckily they're not trying to fly around the world. They're
Speaker 1: not dealing with with typhoons and uh in in enemy airspace.
Speaker 1: But they are flying in a plane over the over
Speaker 1: the ground. Uh, they were very lucky not to die.
Speaker 1: Now Matt Pipkin and his dad Check are now working
Speaker 1: to find a suitable aircraft, likely Assessna want to try
Speaker 1: to break the record and in doing so to raise
Speaker 1: money in awareness for sexual abuse victims with their nonprofit
Speaker 1: which is called Speak Your Silence. And instead of flying
Speaker 1: circular paths, they want to chart across country path hoping
Speaker 1: to draw more attention as they pass over each location. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I can see that being more of a thing,
Speaker 1: you know, you can sort of like watching the space
Speaker 1: station and go over, except a little more visible. Because
Speaker 1: they they're these guys trying to to break this record.
Speaker 1: Uh So currently they have not done it yet. So
Speaker 1: by the time you listen to this podcast, who knows,
Speaker 1: maybe they will have completed this, maybe they actually beat
Speaker 1: this longstanding record record. Yeah, they are slated to fly
Speaker 1: or they're hoping to buy Summer. Of course, they have
Speaker 1: to raise all the funds to do this, and they've
Speaker 1: been trying to put it together for years. So it's
Speaker 1: it's you know, I hope they get it off the
Speaker 1: ground literally, but but we'll see. Yeah, and if you
Speaker 1: want to check out that nonprofit again, it is speak
Speaker 1: your silence, all right. So we've talked about birds, We've
Speaker 1: talked about planes that are piloted by human beings. But
Speaker 1: of course we live in an amazing and at times
Speaker 1: frightening new age of U A. V's of robotic airplanes
Speaker 1: that fly around and uh and fly all over the world.
Speaker 1: In fact, we just had a news item not too
Speaker 1: long ago about the possibility of Amazon dot Com using
Speaker 1: drones to deliver packages. So it would make sense that
Speaker 1: you would start to look at these drones and uh,
Speaker 1: these unmanned flights and solar power and see what you
Speaker 1: can figure out. Yeah, because solar power, of course is
Speaker 1: a great option for this because I think back to
Speaker 1: the voyager that was a situation where he had a
Speaker 1: very light plane. Uh, it only concerns were the fuel
Speaker 1: to keep it going and just the bare minimum for
Speaker 1: human survival aboard it and human piloting of it. Is
Speaker 1: this the Routon voyager, you have Ruton voyager. So in
Speaker 1: this case, so if you if you take the humans
Speaker 1: out of the scenario, all right, you don't have to
Speaker 1: that's a lot of rooms saved, right there, a lot
Speaker 1: of worries. You don't have to worry about the pilot
Speaker 1: falling asleep or or having trouble going to the bathroom
Speaker 1: or what have you. And then if you take the
Speaker 1: fuel out of the scenario, the onboard fuel in the
Speaker 1: term in the in the form of of of gasoline,
Speaker 1: that illipens it up even more and allow exactly you
Speaker 1: get to create basically a flying solar panel in the
Speaker 1: form of the Zephyr created by the company of quinty Q.
Speaker 1: Again it's a drone, it's a robotic airplane. It's you know,
Speaker 1: very light, and it has all the solar panels on
Speaker 1: top of it. And UH. The interesting record that it's
Speaker 1: set here for for the longest ua V flight was
Speaker 1: was that it flew for UM July nine did July
Speaker 1: over the us UH kicking off at the Army's a
Speaker 1: hum approving ground in Arizona. It clocked three thirty six
Speaker 1: hours twenty two minutes, or fourteen days a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks in the year. What I love about this is
Speaker 1: that it has such high technology and you know, you've
Speaker 1: got these recharged lithium soul for batteries, you've got the
Speaker 1: solar panels. But it took five people to handle launch
Speaker 1: it at the test range before it could actually reach
Speaker 1: an altitude of seventy thousand feet and then began to
Speaker 1: use the solar panels on the plane's wings and ultimately
Speaker 1: it didn't stay up near as long as two guys
Speaker 1: in assessment with some help from you from some dudes
Speaker 1: on the ground in a truck. But it's it's important
Speaker 1: because this maybe the future. There's a there's a company
Speaker 1: called Tightened Aerospace. It's also very much involved in the
Speaker 1: development of aircraft like this, and they're eyeing a five
Speaker 1: year fly that's what they're they're they're hoping for, hoping
Speaker 1: to manufacture this. Uh uh, This the special UIV with
Speaker 1: three thousand solar panels. And a huge advantage here is
Speaker 1: that this would essentially be a cheaper and more environmentally
Speaker 1: friendly alternative to a satellite, because if you want to
Speaker 1: get a satellite up there to uh, you know, if
Speaker 1: you're monitoring something, if you're spying on something, or or
Speaker 1: you know, some sort of communications technology needs to be
Speaker 1: deployed at a at a high altitude. Satellites are expensive
Speaker 1: and the only way to send that payload up there
Speaker 1: is on the uh, the other end of an enormous
Speaker 1: explosion that is pumping out all sorts of bad stuff
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere. Yeah. Now, the next one on our list,
Speaker 1: which actually is our last one, is so sci fi.
Speaker 1: I love it. It is actually beamed laser power. And
Speaker 1: what we're talking about is that in two thousand and twelve,
Speaker 1: Tom Nugent's company, Laser Motive, they beamed enough energy to
Speaker 1: a seventeen point five pound drone's Lockheed Martin Stalker to
Speaker 1: keep it airborne at least forty eight hours, about forty
Speaker 1: six hours longer than they drunk and usually fly. And
Speaker 1: it was a demonstration of the lasers are capabilities. There's
Speaker 1: no prototype yet. Yeah, this is a really awesome technology
Speaker 1: now in the concept alone of wireless energy transmission. This
Speaker 1: has been for around for a little while, uh, the
Speaker 1: technology has just been kind of catching up with this. Uh.
Speaker 1: For instance, as far as using microwave energy to transfer
Speaker 1: that that that power to a flying uh vessel like
Speaker 1: that's been around for a while. We've proven that technology.
Speaker 1: But the problem there is the the the greater the
Speaker 1: distance between the microwave emission and the recipient vehicle, the
Speaker 1: less power is going to be transmitted. So it would
Speaker 1: be super helpful. If all you wanted was a drone
Speaker 1: to circle your skyscraper or something, you can just microwave
Speaker 1: that energy too, and it's fine. But if you're sending
Speaker 1: a drone out on a on a long mission, uh,
Speaker 1: the laser technology, that's where the advantage is. Because you're
Speaker 1: gonna have persistent power. Uh. You still will have to worry,
Speaker 1: you know about the environmental factors about whether, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: you wouldn't have to have regular microwave energy stations spread
Speaker 1: out over over a certain distance. You could have far
Speaker 1: fewer laser transmission centers that would be lasering that power
Speaker 1: right to the drone. Yeah. NuGen actually told Popular Mechanics
Speaker 1: that it's like plugging a system into a wall, taking
Speaker 1: that electricity and converting it to light and transmitting that
Speaker 1: light through open air to a receiver which converts the
Speaker 1: light back into electricity, and the laser system can transfer
Speaker 1: only about electricity it takes from its ground source. But
Speaker 1: drones like the Stocker don't require a huge amount of energy,
Speaker 1: and in that June test, its batteries held more energy
Speaker 1: after the test than when it began, So it may
Speaker 1: be something that actually works very well for the sort
Speaker 1: of scenario. And certainly when you start combining laser emitted
Speaker 1: energy with solar energy for a drone and you're seeing
Speaker 1: the best of both worlds it can get. It can
Speaker 1: feast on solar energy when that's available, and when it's not,
Speaker 1: you can you can deal with the direct beamed energy
Speaker 1: and vice versa, depending on which is easier to deploy.
Speaker 1: You're also satisfying your eight year old nacy of a
Speaker 1: remote control like behemoth in the air. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: kind of a light behemoth, very spread out, very very elegant. Um.
Speaker 1: It's really it is really phenomenal to to envision this,
Speaker 1: this potential future where maybe we get a little less
Speaker 1: dependent upon straight up satellites and more on these, uh,
Speaker 1: these sort of ephemeral drones that are just soaring through
Speaker 1: the air, feasting off of solar energy, and also this
Speaker 1: crazy laser energy that we're beaming up to you know,
Speaker 1: I was thinking about that as we talked about satellites.
Speaker 1: I think it us in the Satellite Junkies episode and
Speaker 1: we talked about, at least in the US, how there
Speaker 1: are not nearly as many satellites up or plans to
Speaker 1: put them up, and how that would impact us adversely
Speaker 1: in terms of weather and um all sorts of intelligence
Speaker 1: gathering capability. So this might be a really good alternative,
Speaker 1: and we look even further into the future. This idea
Speaker 1: of of laser energy also factors into our potential to
Speaker 1: put up stay solar energy harvesting satellites in space and
Speaker 1: then beaming the energy back to Earth or back to
Speaker 1: some other space station, moon station, you name it, as
Speaker 1: well as a as a potential means of propelling solar
Speaker 1: sale spacecraft vast distances through the Cosmos. Uh In the
Speaker 1: solar sales thing's just an elegant idea in the first place,
Speaker 1: and we have done an episode on that as well
Speaker 1: as to check it out. So there you go, just
Speaker 1: a crash course in the question how long can I
Speaker 1: go to stay in the air. How long can a
Speaker 1: bird stay in the air? How long can a man
Speaker 1: made craft stay in the air with or without humans
Speaker 1: aboard it? Yeah, and how long was the great oz
Speaker 1: up in the hot air balloon? Anyway, that's a valid question, right,
Speaker 1: someone's figured that out. Somebody's probably applied the mess to this. Well. Hey,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out more on this than
Speaker 1: other topics, if you want to see what we're blogging about,
Speaker 1: you want to listen to other podcast episodes, particularly, you
Speaker 1: want to find that that that solar sale episode we
Speaker 1: were talking about as an older episode, you probably won't
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Speaker 1: all the archives everything you could possibly want, including links
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