FACTORALY - E128 AEROPLANES

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Aeroplanes are fascinating. Nowadays, they're part of our working, resting and playing lives. But where did they start? What drove their development, and why is airline food so ghastly? We'll answer all these questions in this week's episode. And because Aeroplanes are so visual, these show notes are more fascinating than ever! As always, go to factoraly.com to dive, dive, dive into many more facts... Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, Bruce. Hello, Simon. How are you today? I'm feeling flighty. Flighty. I'm feeling a bit plain. Are you? Ah, there you go.

Hello, everybody. Hello, everyone. Welcome to factorily. You know what it is. It's facts. It's orally. It's stuff. Yes.

He's Bruce. I'm Simon. We bring you facts because we're nerds. Yep. And we're voiceovers. Yes, that too. Should you need a voice ever with this voice? Or this voice.

Then all you have to do, is find us. Yes. Actually, if you go to factorily.com, it's got our profiles on there and you can click on the links and go to our profiles. So it has. I forgot all about that.

Yes. There you go then. Quick plug. Anyway, after the commercials. Yes, indeed. So we have a random subject generated for us each week. We do some research. We talk about it. You all get to listen.

Sometimes it's a very small subject that we make bigger. Sometimes it's a very big subject that we make 30 minutes. And sometimes we decide to talk about something that could just have books and books and books written about it. And probably already has. Probably has already, yes. So we're talking about airplanes.

Yeah, airplanes for 30 minutes. Here we go. Gosh. There's going to be loads of stuff that we would normally talk about planes. That is in other stuff. So we did an episode on kites, for example, which is about how the first airplanes were kites. Yes. Let's not talk about that and why they're called kites.

Yes, we talked about hot air balloons and various other forms of getting. a human into the air. Exactly. Before, before planes. Yes. Anyway, but this one's about planes. Yeah.

It's sort of a natural progression. Yes. Okay, so why are they called aeroplanes? Okay, so let's start there. Aeroplanes, quite simple really. It's an old Greek word aeroplanos. Aero meaning air planos meaning to wander.

So it means to wander through the air. Oh, how nice. I thought it was to do with like surfaces, like, you know, an aeroplane. So it sort of turns into. to that. It's one of those words that has lots of different offshoots that ends up in different areas. Okay. So, Planos, wandering along or going through something like going through the air, that becomes a

plane like a wood plane. You know, you plane a layer of wood off with a wood plane. Yes. A plane, a spiritual plane, whatever. Yes, a level of existence, yes. It's sort of a level or a surface or a channel through. It's all connected. But the word aeroplane first appeared in French in the 1850s. Oh, okay. And at the time, it was specifically in reference to the shell, the casing of a beetle's wings.

So the hard surface of a beetle's wing was called by the French, an aeroplane. Okay. Because that is the thing that allows the beetle to wander through the air. The word wasn't used to refer to flying machines until the mid-1860s. Oh, interesting. So the word already existed before it meant what it means. I mean, you mentioned flying machines. This brings me on to one of my favorite films,

those magnificent men in their flying machines. Oh, they're the ones that go up-diddly-up-dub. That's the one. And down-dly-and-down. Yes, I know. So if you watch the beginning of that film, the titles have a lot of failed attempts at flying machines at the very beginning, which is hysterical to watch.

And I'll put it. We have show notes, and there are some wonderful videos. that go with this one. I bet, yeah. This is going to be quite the visual spectacle, isn't it? So if you want to try and find the show notes, guess where you go? Oh, I know this one. I think it's factorily.com. Factoria.com? That's the one. Okay. So go there.

So lots of failed attempts. This thing actually goes back quite a long way, doesn't it? I sort of think of the Wright brothers. You know, I remember being at school, being dogmatically instructed that the Wright brothers invented the aeroplane. That's it, full stop. What about Da Vinci? What about it? It's preposterous. But there is just so much of it. In around 400 BC in Greece, there was a fellow called Architis, who allegedly built the first

aircraft. It was a model thing, but it was propelled by a jet of steam, and it flew a couple of hundred meters. Wow. 400 BC. So we're talking about propelled flight here. We're not talking like gliders and stuff like that. It's a tricky one because gliders do come into it

because right before the Wright brothers, lots of people were doing stuff with gliders. Right. There was a chap in France who, there are so many firsts, you know, year after year after year, hooray, we've achieved manned flight. Yes. Because of doing something slightly different

to the person who did it before. There was an English fellow called George Cayley in 1799, who's some, well, I've never heard of him, but apparently he's often known as the father of aviation. 17, sorry, 1799. 1799, yeah. So he was experimenting with model planes. Yeah.

He was sort of, you know, some of them were gliders. Some of them were just catapulted into the air and glid along. Glid? Glided. Glided. Along. He actually built a passenger carrying glider in the 1850s. So he spent, you know, the first half of the 19th century working on these different models and machines

and setting up lots of principles to do with lift and stuff. And then you've got Da Vinci's helicopters. Yeah. Have you done any research into helicopters? Because I haven't. No, because they're not airplanes. Are they not? Well, no, they're not.

Okay. Good. But yes, it's one of those things where, you know, people stand on the shoulders of giants. there is just event after event person after person history after history of people making tiny little steps this one was slung into the air by a catapult this one was drawn along by a horse with a tow rope this one had a steam engine this one had a propeller

etc etc until you get to the Wright brothers the bicycle boys yes so there's no outright this person definitely invented the plane it's not that simple no But let's just say it. Okay.

Kitty Hawk, Wright brothers, sure. Bicycle manufacturers, kite, attaching engine, airplane. Yes, I think see our episode on kites. Yes, I think so too.

So go and listen to that and then hop back in here. Actually, one thing that we didn't mention about the Wright brothers, which I found out quite recently, was what they did when they were stuck with a problem, this is an interesting, I mean, this is for everybody, right? So if you're stuck with a problem, and there are two of you, and you're holding opposing positions on this problem,

swap positions. So what they would do is each would argue the other's position to each other. Oh. So they would see the benefits and the drawbacks and come to a compromise and work out the solution. So rather than being totally biased towards their own personal opinion? Yes. And this is a very old, I mean, there's a thing called rhetoric. Yes.

And when you look into rhetoric, I mean, there are so many rhetorical exercises. that you can do. And this is one of the rhetorical exercises back from Greece. That's a great idea. They also did things like the three-point speech where you go, there's this, there's this, and there's this. That's rhetoric. Hmm, okay.

And there's lots of other rhetorical exercises. But the swapping sides in an argument is something that the Wright brothers did. Rhetorical questions are good, aren't they? Okay, so we've got them out the way. What's next? I tell you what, we hardly ever mention women on this thing. That's very true. History is a little bit male-centric.

And that's not right. No. So why do we talk about Lillian Bland? Oh, go on then. Okay, so Lillian Bland was from an Anglo-Irish sort of gentry family, very posh. Her uncle knew that she was very keen on flight. She used to, when she was even from a kid, she used to go and watch the birds fly and work out how they were flying.

Anyway, so when Louis Blereo flew the channel in 1909, she went to an air show in Blackpool. Right. And looked around and took lots of measurements and all the airplanes and stuff that. And she went back to Ireland and she built an airplane. Good grief. From scratch. Huh.

And she designed it. She built a scale model. The model worked. She then scaled up the model to a full-size thing. And she was the first woman to design, build and fly, because she had to learn how to fly it. Of course. An aeroplane. It was called the Mayfly.

Wow. And what year was this? This was about, well, she was inspired in 1909 and she got the airplane off the ground in 1910. Crikey. That's jolly good going. I mean, really, really good. Wow. I mean, there were a few sort of improvisations in the airplane.

She didn't have a proper fuel tank, so she found an old whiskey bottle. And then to get the fuel to the engine, she used her aunt's ear trumpet. Wow. So, yeah, if you go to the show, it says the whole story of Lillian Bland is there. She's an amazing woman. Now, there was a fellow who I seem to remember you mentioning. I don't know if you've done any research on him.

I've kind of bumped into him in passing. A German fellow called Otto Lilliantole. Oh, no, I haven't done any research on him at all. Oh, good, okay. This fella, again, yet another pioneer, yet another person who did things first, but then developed it into something else. Between 1867 and 1896, so again, you know, quite early on, pre-Wright brothers, he developed a phrase that I keep on coming across, which is heavier than air flight. Right. Which means any old person can have an item that is so light that it just wafts in the air because,

it's light. It's buoyant. Or a balloon. Yeah. A balloon, anything like that. But heavier than air flight means a machine that is actually so heavy. It couldn't naturally waft on the wind. It has to be lifted through science, the, engineering stuff.

And he developed, essentially he developed the concept of the modern wing. The aerodynamics, where the air goes faster over the top. Yeah. So the wing, if you look at the profile of a wing from sideways on, the top of it is curved and so the air moves faster over the top than it does underneath, which creates low pressure above, high pressure beneath, and that lifts the wing up. And he kind of came up with that. Again, it took a few ideas from here and there and everywhere, but he's sort of the first person to have written it down in those terms. And his work really heavily inspired the Wright brothers.

They're sort of on record as saying we wouldn't have done this without Otto Lillianthal. So he was, you know, another great sort of pioneer in the area. Good on Otto. Well done, Otto. So America was at the forefront of lots of aviation stuff in airplanes. They still, I mean, they still generally are sort of one of the world's leading manufacturers of airplanes. But the Italians got in there as well. Okay, yes.

Now, from the American point of view, we've heard of the spruce goose. Yes, I have, yeah. So the spruce goose was Howard Hughes, who was Hughes Aviation. HUEes, you know, helicopters and things like that. Oh, whoa, whoa, is that why we nickname Helicopters Hueys? Yes. After Howard Hughes? Yes.

I've always wondered that. Ah, that's brilliant. That's what I'm taking from today. Okay, good. So, yeah, so he had a thing called the Spruce Goose, which was this enormous plane that he tried to make fly, and he eventually got it just about off the ground. Yeah.

Or off the water. Off the water, it was sort of a water pang, wasn't it? And then sort of put it away and never spoke of. of it again. There was an Italian version of the same thing. Oh, really? Which is brilliant. It's called the Caproni Novi Plano, the CA-60. Count Giovanni Caproni. He built aeroplanes for the First World War. He had like biplanes and triplanes and things like that and bombers and stuff as well. But after the war, he thought, there's going to be quite a lot of passenger travel on these things. So what we need to do is we need to create passenger planes. So he came up with this

Nevi Plano, which is the CA60. And it had three sets of triplane wings. So it had nine wings. Oh my goodness. It had eight engines. Some of whom were pushing the plane forward and some of it were pulling it forward.

Okay. So it depends on which way around you have the propellers. Sure, yeah. Go to the show notes and watch the video on this thing. I promise you, you will not be disappointed. It looks amazing. He wanted it to carry a hundred passengers. So he built it as a seaplane.

And the bottom half looks like a hotel. I mean, it is huge this thing. It's got room for all the passengers in it and luggage and freight and stuff. And what year was this? This was in 1921. Really? That's not really very long past the sort of the first sustained flights. Yeah, exactly.

Wow. It had two engineers in open cockpits to monitor how the engines were doing and to match the speed of the propellers. And they would talk to each other through a series of lights blinking on a dashboard. They couldn't talk to each other, obviously. Of course. There was no communication.

They decided to test fly it. And when they started it, they noticed that the front was coming up a bit too quickly. So they thought, well, okay, we'll try it with sandbags where the passengers should be and see if it still comes up too quickly. And it was. So they put another bit of weight in the front. And it was still floating fine. It was still working as a seaplane.

Yeah. Then they tried to fly it and they got about 18 metres. Right. And they reached the height of about four metres. And then it crashed. And they never flew it again. Oh, what a shame. That sounds incredible. It's funny, what sort of different purposes we have for aircraft.

There sort of seem to be two major uses for airplanes. One is commercial, the other is military. And the two sort of fed into each other, you know, developments in one. influenced the other and vice versa. Commercial flights, passengers and even cargo took a surprisingly long

time to my mind at least to really work out, you know, after the experimental proof of concept bit. Aeroplanes were very, very quickly adopted in warfare. It actually took quite a while for successful commercial flights to get off the ground, no pun intended.

But where aeroplanes first were used commercial, was in the delivery of mail. Which we talked about in our episode on mail. Yes, I expect we probably did. And this was the Americans, actually. Americans sort of started using aeroplanes for mail. Obviously, the more cargo you put on or the more people you put on,

the heavier it is, the better the engineering needs to be, the more expensive it becomes. And it just wasn't really viable for a long time. But the Americans used it for airmail. That turned into packages. That turned into a few people saying, can I get a lift on your airmail plane and let me pay you a few bucks for the pleasure. Yes.

This is like the post bus, I guess. Yes, very much so, yeah, just like an air post bus. But it was quite a slow development to get to that point. Yes. And I still find it really interesting that passenger planes today carry cargo. And I don't think I'd ever really come to terms with that until the first time I ever went on a plane. and I saw this team down on the tarmac pulling these great big

metal sort of freight crates for once of a better word out of the airplane I just thought oh that's got people's luggage on it and someone said no no that's cargo that's all in containers I had always assumed we had separate cargo planes and passenger planes

well we do we do as well yes because you see some with FedEx written on the side yes of course you do yeah but apparently nearly all passenger planes carry at least some cargo in the hold along with the luggage.

Yes. And this can sometimes comprise about 50% of an airline's revenue. I did not know that. Yeah, neither did I. So commercial airlines today that the current statistics say that there are about 4 billion passengers per year over the whole world in commercial airlines. And there are 200 billion ton kilometres, which is sort of a ton of cargo traveling a kilometer,

200 billion ton kilometers of cargo going by plane every year, which to my mind sounds a lot. Apparently that's only 1% of the world's cargo. The rest goes by boat, train, truck, whatever. But it's quite a thing. But then, you know, that's not the only sort of cargo. They also fly livestock in airplanes. as well. Okay. And they've been doing it for a while. They've been testing it to see, you know, how

animals react on aeroplanes and things. I see. For a long time. So, for example, in 1930 on February the 18th, there was a Guernsey cow named Nellie J. Oh. Who's also known as Elm Farm Olly, for some reason, flew from Bismarck, Missouri on a Ford Trimotor plane to the International Aviation exhibition in St. Louis. And Nelly J. was chosen because she was a high milk producing cow and because she had a calm nature. And the idea of the trip was to show the ability of the aircraft and to take scientific data about the cow's behaviour. Oh, I see. And the pilot was a guy called Claude Sterling. And the man who got a record for this was Ellsworth W. Bunce of Wisconsin. What a great name. Who accompanied the cow. And he didn't only accompany the cow. He milked

the cow. Mid flight. Mid flight. During the 72 mile flight, the milk that Nellie J gave, what they did is they packaged it in paper cartons. Yeah. So remember this is at an aviation exhibition in St. Louis. Yeah. So what they did was they put it all in paper cartons and then they flew over the exhibition and they parachuted these paper cartons of milk to the spectators who were watching the flight.

Oh, wow. Apparently that this cow produced 24 quarts of milk, so 48 pints of milk. Wow. During the flight. Rumour has it that Charles Lindberg actually received one of the courts at the exhibition. And Nelly J became known as the Sky Queen after that flight. Well done, Nellie. So cows can fly even if pigs can't. Having mentioned the use of airplanes in warfare, I mean, this is an entire subject on its own, so I won't spend too long on it.

but just the rapid expansion of the use of aeroplanes in warfare. And, you know, let's bear in mind what we've been talking about the dates so far. You know, we've only been talking about sort of 1905, 1910. Yeah. Still things are relatively experimental. At the beginning of the First World War, 1914, you know, they were making sort of several hundred airplanes and trying to use them in combat. by the end of the First World War

they were producing tens of thousands of aeroplanes to use in combat. See our episode on moths. Indeed. Over the whole of the First World War, between both sides, over 145,000 airplanes were built and used in combat. I would never have thought it would be that many. I was thinking a handful. Well, I know they started off as observation.

That's right. They were just flying over the trenches Just looking at what's happening And then a couple of pilots took darts up with them And started throwing darts out of their airplanes Yeah Oh, that's great So when they got back

They threw a few darts at the jerrys Yeah And the juries would come over and throw a few darts at us And then I said, why didn't we do some hang grenades? Right So they flew over and dropped hand grenades in the trenches Actually, why do we make bigger Bigger explosives and drop them in the june?

So then they may, invented the bomber. Yes. And then let's strap a couple of machine guns to the front of the plane and have a dog fights. Yes, exactly. You know, I think of the Red Baron. Yes.

As we all know, I'm a bit of a Blackadder fan. In one particular episode of Blackadder goes forth, Aid Edmondson, plays Baron von Richthoeven, the Red Baron. Yes. And his arch nemesis with Rick Mail, Lord Flashard. And, you know, that concept, you know, airplanes are still relatively new, relatively experimental, the idea of putting a bloke in a plane with a machine gun, flying in the sky, shooting at another bloke in a plane with a machine gun. That's almost mind-blowing for the time. You know, that was a

very, very new idea. So given that they had machine guns facing forward through the propellers. Yeah, so this is really clever. They had sort of like a timing chain so that the machine gun would fire in the gaps between the propeller blades rotating around. So the bullets would shoot through the gaps in the propeller rotation. And, yeah, so I just find all of that fascinating. But then from 145,000 odd of them being made and used in the First World War, in the whole of the Second World War, 800,000 airplanes were built and used, again, on both sides.

Golly. Quite a lot of the British manufacturer of wartime airplanes were done, roughly in my neck of the woods. The company Hawker had a factory in Kingston where they made hurricanes and other brands that I'd never heard of, typhoons and tempests apparently. Brooklyn's again quite near me,

which had previously been a motor racing track, they stopped making motor cars and started making airplanes. Barnes-Wallis was based at Brooklyn's where he came up with the design for the bouncing bomb used in the movie Danbus. you know. Yes, yes.

So. Not just in the movie. Well, no, in real life, but, you know, that's what most people were know for. And, you know, so you sort of go for a drive around these parts. You drive through Kingston through Waybridge, Windsor, all of these places. Every southeast of England. Yeah. Or generally speaking, was a goldmine.

Every major town has a sculpture of an aeroplane somewhere because this particular make of aeroplane was built in this area. And if it hadn't been for this area, the war didn't have turned out. differently. Nearer me we have De Haveland, just north of London as well. Yeah. So there's that. Yeah. See our episode on Monk. But yeah, so it's an awful lot in the southeast of England. And apparently the first, again, I didn't realize some of these things happened so early on. But the jet engine was created sort of in the late 30s.

Frank Whittle. Very good. I didn't look that up. I just happened to know that from being a young boy. being told about Frank Whitton. Oh, wonderful. I've done nothing on Frank Whittle. Oh, me neither. But what I did find,

the first fighter plane to use a jet engine was in the Second World War. It was a German airplane. It was a Messerschmitt in... 109E? Very good. Was it?

I don't know. I'm just taking your word for it. Okay, no, I think it was a 109E. Was it? I mean, I know this from Airfix. Oh, okay. Fine. Look, I tell you what,

we have an email address. Hello at factorily.com. If we get stuff wrong, please tell us because we know we've got stuff wrong. Absolutely. And it's very nice to be told. This is obviously a very, very potted history of aeroplanes. So if you happen to be an aeroplane officiado and want to share your knowledge, then please do so. But yeah, the idea of a jet fighter being used in 1943 blows my mind.

To my mind, jet fighters are top gun. They're 1980s. That's where they exist. 1943, the Germans were using a jet fighter. I can't get my head around that. So one of the things that happens when you're dogfighting, in the old days you sat in your shoot. Yes.

But then when you have a jet, it's going faster. So jumping out of an aeroplane from a jet is quite difficult. I would imagine. So what you need to do is invent something that will get you out of the airplane quicker. Yes. When they first invented the ejector seat, it was for a thing called the F102 Starfighter.

Right. which had a very big tailplane. So they thought, well, if we go up and the pilot doesn't get out fast enough, he's going to be sliced in half by the tailplane. Oh, ouch, okay, yeah. So rather than take him out that way, why don't we drop him through the floor? Oh, right. So it just sort of opened like a bond door.

Exactly. So there were downward ejection seats until they created the rocket-powered ejector seat, which gets you out of the way of the aircraft much faster. So like the F-102 Starfighter, there was a downward ejection seat. So you basically had to be above a certain height to use the ejectcy. Otherwise, it would just fire you straight into the ground. Yes. The B-52s, the early B-52s had downward ejection because they were bombers.

And you can't get out of those. They're very big. Loads of them had downward ejection seats. And if you go to our, again, to the show notes, you'll see how this works. Great. I discovered that there were two people who survived two crashes. Right. Okay.

Ernest Hemingway and his wife. Oh. Who went up in a plane and it crashed. He got on the next plane and that crashed. No. So two crashes in two days. Good grief. That's nice to put you off, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. But the other one, which I thought was fascinating. And when you hear him talk about it, he gets very emotional. Gene Roddenberry. Okay. Gene Roddenberry, who created Star Trek, was a combat pilot in the Second World War. Really?

And he flew 89 missions in bombings. in a B-17. Gosh. And then after the war finished and he kind of left the Air Force. He just loved flying. He wanted to fly since he was a kid. And he was a really good flyer.

And then he was picked up by Pan Am. Right, yeah. So he became a Pan Am pilot going sort of internationally around the world. And he did that for a bit. And then he thought, I don't want to be an international bus driver because basically I'm just sitting there for most of the time.

It's just the takeoffs and landings that are the interesting bit. Most of it's just sitting there doing nothing. Yeah. Well, pretty much nothing. So he started to write ideas down. One of the ideas that he wrote down was this idea for like a soap opera in space. Wow.

And he came up with the idea of Star Trek. Whilst on a long haul transatlantic flight. Yeah, just bored on a transatlantic flight as a Pan Am pilot. That's amazing. Came up with this thing. Met Lucille Ball at a party. And she had a production company with her then husband. husband, Desi Arnaz.

Yes. And she listened to what he had to say because he was in, because she listened to all his pilot stories as well and talking during the war and fighting things and dropping bombs on things. And she's, that's very interesting. So if you watch the first Star Trek episodes,

you'll see that they are produced by Desilu productions, which was Desi Annes and Lucille Ball. Wonderful. What we're talking about sort of passenger plays, and international flights. Yeah. Not to everybody who starts the flight makes it to the other end.

Okay. And if you do die on an airplane, what BA used to do is prop you up to make you look as though you were awake with a copy of the daily mail, a gin and tonic, and some sunglasses. I beg your pardon. Just leave you in the seat.

Move the person next to you away, but just make it look as though you're sort of just asleep or just reading the newspaper. So as not to watch. worry the other passengers? Exactly. Exactly. Nowadays, some aeroplanes, they have like lockers that they put the dead people in

or they move them to first class or whatever. But yeah. So that's what happens. If you're born on an airplane, you can claim the nationality of the country of registration of that airline. Can you? Not the country that you happen to be over at the time. Not where you've started or where you've left,

but because you're actually on the airplane and it's outside of national limits. You can claim nationality of the airline's nationality. That's fantastic. Isn't that good? I find some unusual stuff. Hijacking is another thing that you want to watch out for in airplanes, obviously. And Norway's very first airplane hijacking ended

when the hijacker decided to trade in his gun for more beer. Most airplanes don't have a row 13 for obvious reasons. So when you're walking down the plane, it goes from row 12 to row 14. Great. Early flights, they used to weigh passengers so that they kind of got the balance right of where the weight is. That makes sense. Yeah. Qatar is quite interesting. Qatar Airways, you're allowed to take a falcon with you.

Are you? Yes. Not just first class, anywhere in the airplane, but only up to six. falcons per aeroplane. So seven of you want to fly with a falcon, one of you's got to stay behind with your falcon. I know falconry is quite popular in Qatar, but it would never have occurred to me that anyone would sort of take one on a plane with them. Yeah.

Wow. And then, of course, you get fed on an airplane. So, I mean, we could have spent ages talking about airline food. Oh, we could have done, couldn't we? Yeah. The fact that they make the food hyper tasty, don't they? Because of the air pressure in the cabin. Your ability to taste is slightly reduced, so they put on extra salt and extra umami.

Not just not slightly. Your taste buds lose their sensitivity by about 30%. Oh really? That much? About 30,000 feet, yeah. Wow. So that old adage of aeroplane food tasting rubbish is not the fault of the airplane food. It's physics. Yes. I would imagine there may be more than one record that the Guinness book has to offer us on aeroplanes. This section is absolutely impossible. As soon as one record. record has been made. Another one is made very shortly after, you know,

the fastest plane. The next plane is built to go half a mile an hour faster than the previous one. It's impossible. But I picked out a few that intrigued me. There's a record for the longest continuous manned non-stop flight. In 1958,

well, actually it crossed over from 1958 to 1959. There was a flight that lasted 64 days and 22 hours, almost 65 I guess mid-light refueling. Absolutely. Was this one of these spy planes sort of things?

No, no. This was a publicity stunt done on behalf of the Hasseander Hotel in Las Vegas. Okay. These two pilots, Robert Tim and John Cook, they flew a modified Cessna 172. They took off on the 4th of December, 1958. They landed on the 7th of February, 1959. Wow. And they took it in turns to do shifts.

flying this plane. They refueled. This was very clever. They flew incredibly low to the ground along a very, very sort of open stretch of desert. And a fuel truck matched their speed at the ground. The airplane dropped a hose down to the truck. What? And it fueled the plane mid-flight from the ground. That's insane. Isn't it just? That's the thing that sort of stood out the most for me. But yeah, almost 65 days on an airplane. Imagine how many episodes have stood up. joke you could write on that. That's ridiculous. There's a record for the most

passengers on a single flight. I don't understand how this works. A Boeing 747 in 1991 managed to squeeze 1,088 passengers on board. I clearly don't know how bigger Boeing 747 is. Well, if it's the newer ones, they have like two levels

so they have like the upstairs and the downstairs. Yeah. But I imagine if you, rather than having all that luxurious space in first class and then business class and then premium economy class. Yes. And then economy. If you just make the whole thing.

Economy. That's what I'm imagining as well. But 1,088 people on a plane. Can you imagine boarding and de-planing? Sorry, I love that word, deplaning. De-plaining, yes. That would take forever, wasn't it? Yeah, it would.

And then the record for what is currently the fastest aeroplane. This thing is built by NASA. It's called the X-43A. it's a 12 foot long unpilited so it's kind of more of a drone but it's still you know technically an airplane yeah it's a research aircraft uh this thing reached a speed of mac 9.6 which is 9.6 times the speed of sound almost 7,000 miles per hour what hence it being unmanned i don't think a human could survive that i think you're probably right um but yeah like i say who knows next year they'll out the X-43B and it'll go a bit faster. But that's the current record for the fastest aircraft.

Goodness me. Yeah, it's quite fast. Those are my records. I mean, we could go on for hours about airplanes, couldn't we? We absolutely could. I think the show notes are probably going to hold more material than the actual podcast episode this week. Oh, that's always the case. But this week especially. I mean, just think of all the things we haven't mentioned. We haven't mentioned, still. Plains, we haven't mentioned Concord. There's so many, so much more to this than meets the eye. There's lots.

And if we have sparked you off to go and do a little bit of research of your own, then brilliant. Yes. Please tell us what you've found out. Yes. You may have found out, by the way, that I got the Meshesmith wrong. It was an ME 262 that I was thinking of. There you go. There's probably someone sitting at the keyboard right now going, no, it was an ME 262.

And he's going, damn, he's corrected himself. Sorry about that. But if you have enjoyed this episode, please go and tell your friends all about it. I'm sure you have equally nerdy, interested friends who want to listen to this sort of stuff. Yes. Go and tell them about this show so that we can expand our community. Yes. Or give us a really nice five-star.

We are actually one of very few 100% five-star review podcast. Yes, we are. We're quite happy about it. Yeah. Then you can also press the subscribe button on your. podcast player so that every Thursday morning you'll get a notification telling you that a new episode has landed. Oh, ho, ho!

Thank you very much. Did you even think that was coming? I think that was probably by surprise to you. It was, yeah, total surprise. So thank you all so much for coming and listening to us chatting about aeroplanes. Please join us again next time for another fun-filled factual episode of Factory. Bye-bye. Au-voir.