Stuff You Should Know - How Air Force One Works

Episode Date: November 17, 2011

As you might imagine, the President of the United States doesn't fly coach. But what exactly does he use when traveling from point A to point B, and how does it actually work? join Josh and Chuck as they demystify Air Force One. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid for it. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Colonel Chuck. No. Admiral. She's a flight coordinator. I'm a potato dealer. Camp counselor. Yes. Camp counselor. Charles W. Chuck Bryant with me as always. How you doing, Chuck? Hey, it's November. I know. Happy November. November 1, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's just the

first day in November. Did you get any trick or treaters? No. Nothing. I have two sets of steps that lead up to my front door and apparently kids are fat and lazy these days and diabetic. Did they like yell, throw something down here to the street? No. No. We left after a while. We just don't get anybody who comes to our house. Did you get candy? No, not this year. Well, we had before and we just sat there and ended up eating all of it. No one comes to our house either. Yeah. So that's good. At all. Why? Oh, like our neighbors don't, it's sort of like as you come around the bend coming from the other way from the decatur side, that's sort of where it ends, the trick or treating. Like the bend in the road just approaches Memorial Drive and

people just get scary and there's a bus stop and people turn their lights off. My neighbors are old. They don't get into it. Gotcha. I think that's just sort of the demarcation. Did you guys get candy? No, we never, I mean, we never do. So basically it stinks, man. I'm ready for like trick or treaters. Did you dress up at all? Well, for that stupid show I did. Oh, yeah, that's right. You dressed up as Paul Stanley in a three-piece suit. Yeah. Looking good. I think if you ask me, we should post that picture. Yeah, I'll post one. Okay, good. Chuck. Yes. You know Jay Carney is a family friend of my family's. I did not know that. Well, he's not. Okay. I actually got what I'm about to read off of the White House website. I couldn't mislead you. I started to and

I just stopped. So far, it's been a typically busy week for President Barack Obama. Monday, he went to Las Vegas. Sweet. Delivered some remarks, went to LA. Probably pulled a slaughter too. Probably. Yeah. You have to if you go to Vegas. Just on your way out of here. Everybody's like, get out of here. Right. Then he went to LA, stayed in LA overnight. Right about now, he is doing the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Oh, yeah. Should be on tonight. Terrible. Then he goes to San Francisco, Denver, and then he heads back to DC Wednesday so that he can meet with the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, Petr Neckos. Right. That is a lot of flying. More important than Jay Leno. Yeah. Oh, yeah. You're a Coco fan, aren't you? Team Coco. Yeah. I mean,

even if Conan and Brian didn't exist, I would still think Jay Leno's bad. Did you ever see a night shift, I think is what it was called? Sure. About the first late night war between Jay Leno and Dave Letterman. Yeah, yeah. That was good. That was real good. Okay. Well, aside from that part, yes, you're absolutely right. That's a lot of flying. And every step of the way, Mr. President Barack Obama is going to be aboard a luxury decked out 747 with a tail number of either $28,000 or $29,000. That's right. You know how I know that? Because it's written right here in this wonderful article. Yes. This article called How Air Force One Works on howstuffworks.com. If you're not familiar, you know, a lot of people think like we just, this is our job podcasting.

They don't, but they don't put that together with the site. Yeah. You should visit the site. And we work for a website called howstuffworks.com if you know now. The mystery is solved. And how Air Force One Works is on that site. And we said that 375 times, but people still don't get it. It's true. Like what's your email address? Yeah. So, Chuckers, you want to do some history first? Oh, why not? Have you, before you read this article, had you heard of Air Force One? I had heard of Air Force One. I had not heard of the guess where to. No. Let's start it out, because the presidential air travel is fairly new, right? Yeah. Up until World War II, it wasn't very practical to fly around. And one might even say dangerous. And you were cut off because,

mainly because you were cut off from communications, actually. Yeah, the telegraph, like, no, I want that bill pushed through. Exactly. But in 1943, FDR said, you know what, I want to take my wheelchair up on this Boeing 314. And I want to take a little trip to Casablanca. And that was the first presidential flight. Yeah. And he actually took that flight for practical reasons. It was because the Germans had the Atlantic completely under lockdown, basically. Didn't want to take a boat in those days. Yeah. He was like, no, I'm not going. So, I'll just fly. And it went smashingly. And from that point on, everybody said, maybe the president should fly. They said this boating thing, snakes, we should fly places. Yeah. It's much more efficient.

Yeah. Even a flying boat wouldn't do. We just want a flying plane. That's right. Yeah. So, coming up next, there were, I've got six planes before the new set. That was number one. Number two was a C87A Liberator Express. And it was pretty much a B24 bomber that was, you know, tricked out civilian style. Right. There was padding on the armrest. Exactly. And that was called the Guess Where 2. Right. Which is the worst plane name ever. Yeah. Well, it's a pretty, like, typical 40s-like engineer. It's like a Colonel John Paul Stapp. The Guess Where 2. Yeah. It's pretty bad. The third plane, well, another C87 crashed. And they said, you know what, this might not be the best plane because we don't know exactly why it crashed. Yeah.

We don't want to put the president in there. So then they configured a C54 Skymaster for that same president because he was president for like 60 years. Yeah. And it had sleeping quarters, a radio telephone, a retractable elevator for his wheelchair. Very nice. And it was named the Sacred Cow. Better name? Better than the Guess Where 2. Yeah. It's up there. Okay. I mean, it's okay. It definitely reminds me of our agrarian past. Yeah. All right. Am I covering history here? You got the Truman show next. Took over the Sacred Cow, replaced it with a DC6 called the Independence. Yeah. Now, he was from Missouri. So that makes sense that he would call it the Independence. Sure. Independence, Missouri. And it's the United States. But I also got the impression

that he basically, it was a garish plane that had like an eagle on the front, all sorts of patriotic decorations. Yeah. Nothing else that had been decorated up to that point. It's like the Statue of Liberty threw up on this plane. I haven't seen a picture of it, actually. No. But I could see Truman being like real enthusiastically. Yeah. That there and that there, you know, shoot a commie over there. How about Betty Boop up front? So our boys know. Know something. Eisenhower introduced two propeller planes, upgraded the equipment, including, for the first time, air to ground telephone and air to ground teletype, which was the first computer. It's not true. No, teletype was like fax, right? It was like the

bouncing ball. Yeah. Yeah. I think so. That was the fourth and fifth sets of planes. Right. Well, hold on. So so far, a couple of landmarks have happened, right? They decked it out for Roosevelt. It wasn't just a civilian craft any longer. There was like some fly stuff going on. Yeah. Truman added a couple of other backup planes that were twin planes. Yeah, which is big. Okay. And then now, now where are we on to now? We're on to Kennedy, who in 1958, they finally got with the plan and they got 707 Boeing 707 jumbo jets and they officially called them Air Force one with their radio called designation. Right. That was Eisenhower. That was Eisenhower. Yeah. During Eisenhower's administration, the Air Force adopted the seven seconds and started calling him Air

Force one. And then when Kennedy took over, right, and everybody was crazy for all things presidential Air Force one caught on for the public, right? Because he probably went on and said, Air Force one, right? At some point. But he also redecorated it tastefully in the same way that it's decorated today, which is nice. Yeah. I mean, it's timeless. Yeah. Because you don't look at it and be like, no, maybe blue. Yeah, it's not. It's not the vessel sink of airplanes, right? I'm just knowing what I'm talking about. The war on drugs impacts everyone. Whether or not you take drugs, America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute

2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table without any drugs. Of course, yes, they can do that. And I'm the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington, the news is filled with

decisions, turning points, deals and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the senior executive editor for Bloomberg Opinion. And I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Every week on Crash Course, I'll bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur. And I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts and big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political and social disruptions and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course, a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So Kennedy added a more advanced 707 that could fly a little longer, but it was still a 707, like you said, redesigned it to his probably Jackie's taste. Let's get real. Yeah. And added a twin plane to that fleet in 1972. And that was a very famous plane because that flew him to Dallas and then flew his body back from Dallas. I know the way that it's put in this article is so grim, but just dead on. It says that on November 22, 1963, it flew him to Dallas and then brought his body back later that day, which is crazy. You know, you think about him on that flight on the way out there and then exactly. And then on the way back,

Johnson was sworn in very famously aboard Air Force One. Yeah, that photo is very famous. And then the twin 707 flew Nixon to, I guess, Yorba Linda, California the day he resigned. Is that where he lived? Well, that's where his library is, I believe, is Yorba Linda. But, Chuck, something else kind of big happened that leads us to a very important fact about Air Force One. Go ahead. Mid-flight, the flight crew got word that Ford had been sworn in as president and they changed the call sign for the flight from Air Force One to SMS. S.A.M. Special Air Mission. S.A.M. 27,000. And the reason they did that is because the only the plane that the president of the United States is currently aboard can be called Air Force One. That's right. Nixon

was no longer president, so it was no longer Air Force One. So technically, the big plane that we all think of as Air Force One isn't even Air Force One unless the president is riding in it. Right. But we're going to call it Air Force One because that's what people do. Yeah, we're not jerks, you know. But it's the call sign for a plane, not specifically a plane. That was depressing. I wonder if they announced it to Nixon, like, and by the way, this is no longer Air Force One, this is S.A.M. 27,000. And Nixon just put his head in his hands. Yeah. That was it. I could see that. At least they didn't just crash it. They just jump out. They're like, so long. So long, sucker. Good luck.

So those are the 707s. They kept flying all through Reagan. Yeah. First half of a Bush seniors term. Yeah. And then they're replaced by 747s that are around today. That's right. And the article says that could replace them as early as 2010, which is the 20-year mark. Not so. 2017 is when they're looking to replace these now. It's like a Delta flight or something. Yeah. So it's either going to be another 747-8 or a 787 Dreamliner. Dude, that is a money plane. I checked it out. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. Those are nice. They have a really big bar in it. Yeah. I think that's, no, it's the Airbus, the Emirates flight, the Airbus. Well, there's different configurations. But if

you click Dreamliner, Boeing 787 Dreamliner interior and look at the Google images, it's pretty amazing. And that's just the standard one. I mean, potential planes typically are outfitted and appointed very nicely. Well, and we're there. So let's go. It is appointed nicely. Well, yeah. Tom Harris, who wrote this article, compares it generally to like a really nice hotel or very nice office building. Yeah. But it's a plane instead. Yeah. And there's also Marine One. We don't want to shortchange the helicopter cousin of Air Force One. Which is a Chinook, which is my favorite helicopter. And it's pretty sweet, too, on the inside. I mean, it's like a smaller, nice apartment, pretty much. And that is obviously the, you know, that's the helicopter,

that it's the same designation when the president's on an Army plane. That's Army One. Right. The Marines fly the helicopter. So it's Marine One. Right. And the right now, we've got those identical Boeing 747s, 200B, if you want to get specific. Sure. They have a lot, like we said, they're decked out differently. We'll get to that in a second. But just being 747s, they have some specs that are pretty impressive. Well, they're big. They're three stories, like all 747s. They are as tall as a six-story building and as long as a city block. I guess it depends on what city you're in. I think it does. Or what block you're on. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Are you in the village? Are you uptown? Right. They each have four general electric

jet engines. Right. Do you want to read the jet engine number? Does anyone out there know this? They are GE engines CF6-80C2B1 jet engines, which are money engines. Each one produces 56,700 pounds of thrust, which, as we know from the anti-matter spacecraft episode, produces 5 million Gs, which a human can sustain indefinitely. Yeah, we should point that out real quick. In show correction, Gs measure acceleration. So, in theory, you would speed up really fast and then level out so you wouldn't be experiencing Gs that whole time, like we thought. Yeah. Erroneously. Nice. And thank you, physics people, for correcting us. The 747s fly up to 700 miles per hour. They go as high as 45,100 feet. That's a ceiling maximum. What happens after

that? Do they just break apart? Do they just disintegrate? I don't think they disintegrate. I just think that's how high they can fly safely. It may do something to your body. I don't know. And then they hold 53,611 gallons of fuel and a fully loaded, fully fueled 747, at least the Air Force 1 747s, can fly halfway around the world before refueling. We should go ahead and let the cat out of the bag then. Air Force 1, however, can fly forever. Yeah. Because you can refuel in flight just like the big bomber planes and they thought that would be a pretty swell idea in case the S was hitting the fan on the ground. Which it did on September 11, 2001. Just keep them up there. Yeah. There wasn't that one, the one of the planes United 93 that went down in Pennsylvania.

Right. Wasn't that destined for the White House? I think so. And it was pretty hairy, even if it wasn't. Sure. They had no idea who was doing water when it was going to get hit. So they said, just keep pushing the air. And they did. And they could have for a very long time, not just with fuel, but with food as well. Yeah. They have the ability to feed 100 people. And I think they have freezers down below that hold as much as 2,000 meals. Yeah. So they could have stayed up there for quite a long time. Yeah. 2,000 meals, especially if they started throwing reporters out the door. That's a bunch of meals right there. That's true. So Chuck, the... It does not have an escape pod though. Well, we don't know that it does or not.

The awesome movie Air Force One with Harry Ford. I have not seen it. Is it good? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, do you want to see your president kicking terrorists butt with his hands? Yeah, like he fights. Of course, he's like a former like army ranger or something in the movie. Yeah. We never get presents like that anymore. So yeah, I enjoyed it. So yeah, apparently an escape pod factor is in. Yeah. We don't know if there's one on Air Force One, but there could be. They're supposedly not, but they're not going to tell you that. So I heard that Tom Clancy received a visit from, I don't know who it was, maybe the NSA, the CIA, somebody, maybe the FBI, came to his house and interviewed him because he had hit

the nail on the head so closely when he described some classified nuclear sub in the hunt for red October. They wanted to know how he knew that, what the interior was like. Interesting. So it makes you wonder, you know, what he came up with for Air Force One. Well, and that's one of the points of Air Force One is there's a lot of classified stuff. So while we know a lot of the parts, no one really knows the exact layout and configuration. I mean, people know, but they're sworn to secrecy or have signed on to secrecy. Exactly. But so let's talk about what we do know. There's 4,000 square feet of interior space. That's substantial. That's twice the size of my house. And there's three levels, just like on any 747, but the top level

is for communications generally. The mid level is like the living quarters and most of the bottom level is cargo space and apparently freezers for food. Yeah, although I did see that the president's living quarters, bedroom, bathroom, workout room and office, I heard they were under the cockpit. So maybe the cockpits. I think the cockpits on the third on the third deck. Okay, that makes sense. And we conference room, the conference room is, I mean, they don't have unlimited space. So the conference room is also the president's dining room. And depending on the time of day, you know, some people may be in there, other people might not be there, maybe a meal, there may be some pretzels on the table. It depends. That's right.

Up to 70 passengers and 26 crew in total comfortably. I'm sure they could pack more people in there. Which means they have four leftover meals at every meal. Yeah, you're right. Well, those add up. Yeah, they do. I'm saying you throw a reporter out, bam, that's three meals a day. Well, what if he's a reporter that eats heavy? Well, yeah, what if he's eating those other four meals? You're right. You know, Hunter Thompson flew on Air Force One. Really? With Nixon? 707s, yep, for fear and loathing on the campaign trails 72. Well, because he was a legit journalist, so. He was, well, for Rolling Stone. Yeah. But he got to interview Nixon one-on-one,

but they told him all he could ask him about was football. Did he ask him about football? I'm sure. He was probably like, that's fine with me. Yeah. Rum diaries out. Yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'm going to go see it. I've heard it's an enjoyable mess. Well, good. But so is Hunter Thompson. Yeah. The war on drugs impacts everyone, whether or not you take drugs. America's public enemy number one is drug abuse. This podcast is going to show you the truth behind the war on drugs. They told me that I would be charged for conspiracy to distribute 2200 pounds of marijuana. Yeah, and they can do that without any drugs on the table. Without any drugs,

of course, yes, they can do that in on the prime example. The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The property is guilty. Exactly. And it starts as guilty. It starts as guilty. Cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil asset for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wall Street to Main Street and from Hollywood to Washington,

the news is filled with decisions, turning points, deals and collisions. I'm Tim O'Brien, the senior executive editor for Bloomberg Opinion, and I'm your host for Crash Course, a weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Every week on Crash Course, I'll bring listeners directly into the arenas where epic upheavals occur. And I'm going to explore the lessons we can learn when creativity and ambition collide with competition and power. Each Tuesday, I'll talk to Bloomberg reporters around the world, as well as experts and big names in the news. Together, we'll explore business, political and social disruptions, and what we can learn from them. I'm Tim O'Brien, host of Crash Course,

a new weekly podcast from Bloomberg and iHeart Radio. Listen to Crash Course every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Getting back to Air Force One, the decks you can access up and down with these retractable stairs. And the impression I got is that they're retractable probably so they can seal off the levels, right? I mean, they don't say that in the article, but wouldn't that be the reason? Yeah, I don't know why you didn't just come out and say it, but it's their interior stairs. So, yeah, if the president needed to just go hang out in the cockpit and get away from terrorists, sure, he was losing the fist fight, right? I'm sure he could press a button in the stairs,

just go up and you're stuck on the second level. And there are three exterior entrances as well, but the one we usually see is the photo, obviously, when they wheel out the rolling staircase to the tarmac. And I think that's the front of the plane, the front middle. Yeah, in the middle. Yeah. You know, Obama apparently like in San Francisco, there's a child crying on the tarmac and he went right over to it and grabbed it and like calmed it down. Oh, that's nice. I think that was today. Really? Yeah. And the mother came up and started slapping him. Like, who are you? It's my child. I'm a tea partier. There's a staff area, Josh. There were two galleys, which in this case are like seriously fully functioning kitchens, not the coffee pot

and the little rolling thing of frozen meals. Yeah. Like we said, conference and dining room, and the crew can actually ride and sleep there as well. Yeah. And it's, you know, most of the general space for like the reporters and staff is like a really, really like the nicest first class plane you've ever been on. I know. And that's just where they keep their reporters. Yeah, exactly. So I mean, you imagine that the president's suite is pretty nice. You've been on Elvis's 747 at Graceland. Yeah, the Lisa Marie. Yeah, it's pretty sweet. Yeah. You and me set off the alarm. She sat down on the bed. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting. The alarms just went. She like rolling around like, Oh, this is so lovely. No, she was pretending like she's going to sit

down and then passed like her, her center of balance and went, Oh God. And like, and fell actually sat down on the bed. Yeah, that puts her in rare company. Yeah. And what she got kicked off. Or did they just, they came, she was already standing up by the time they came, we're like, we don't know what happened. Right. Going off by itself. That's pretty funny. Yeah. What else, Josh? Extensive electronics, big time, 85 telephones on board, two way radios, fax, computer, Wi-Fi, 19 TVs. Phone system is just like secure as it is in the White House, apparently. Yep. Which, you know, it has to be. I like the medical facility, which is scary, creepy, weird, you know, let's hear it. So there's an onboard medical facility has a fold down operating table

in case of emergency. It has ER equipment, fully stocked pharmacy for, you know, long flights. And there's a staff doctor that travels everywhere logically with the president. I imagine he's a surgeon, like he's probably, or she is probably well versed in all fields, wouldn't you think? Like I would want a field medic, a field surgeon on the plane. I'm sure it's not just like, you know, a good time doctor or anything like that. I'm sure he's like, probably has all sorts of like ghoulish training, like you can pull a bullet out of your chest or right or do open heart surgery on the fly if he needs to. Yeah. Or if the baby you pick up and trying to calm has some sort of poison toxin on it's skin. Exactly. He knows how to treat that.

That was an anthrax baby. Right. Some pretty cool things as far as defense goes, although we don't know much about it because it's not, you know, it's classified stuff. We've reached the point where Tom Harris just started making stuff up. He did. It is a defense, it is a military aircraft and is capable to withstand and attack. That's what they tell you. They won't tell you how. No, but it has a thick shielding. I wonder if it's lead, but they have, it has shielding to protect the wiring inside and the communications equipment from an electromagnetic pulse that a nuclear bomb gives off. Right. It can send out flares, which are pretty cool. Well, that throws off a heat seeking missile. Exactly. It sounds silly even till you start thinking about

the heat seeker coming at you. Right. And it has, definitely has an electronic countermeasure, which will jam the radar. My feeling is, is that this bad boy has a 50 cal and some rockets that can pop out of different places. I'm just guessing I have no idea if anyone from Homeland Security is listening. If I was a president, I would want some munitions aboard. I would too. And I bet there are, but that's just a guess. Right. And it can, it can squirt like an oil slick after it so that any planes on its trail spin out. It is a military operation. Every time this thing goes up in the air by classification, they send out a crew at Andrews in Maryland. They check out the runway like every inch of that thing before every flight. They send out a plane ahead of time that carries

all the cargo plane that carries all the motor, the motorcade cars, SUVs. It's pretty cool. And if you are a plane junkie, that is a C 141 Starlifter cargo plane that carries the motorcade. I bet it carries a lot of cars. And if you are trying to fly into Andrews Air Force Base at the time when they're starting to prepare for Air Force one to take off or for Marine one to even show up, they're going to shoot you down. They're authorized to shoot on sight. That's right. They're not going to mess around with that. What else, Josh? Oh, the football is always on board. That is the briefcase that famously holds the nuclear codes. And an Air Force officer guards this football during the flight so the president, you know, he can eat without it being handcuffed

to his arm. And then passes it on to an Army officer once they reach the ground. Passes off the football. That's right. And then lastly, that crew. So first of all, the crew on board has two crews as the flight crew and the steward crew. And they quite an honor. Well, yeah, they also screen these people. It's not just like you've been really good. So here's your assignment. Exactly. Like they also have to go through your background and your family's background like you undergo some pretty serious background checks because you're on board this flight with the president. Yeah. And he's pretty vulnerable, including by not just anthrax baby, but poison food attack. Yeah. And where do they get this food? They get it from a local market that's

picked at random that has no idea that these people are coming or who they are because they just wear like dockers and maybe like a member's only jacket. Right. That's what they wear to go shopping for the food. And they mix it up, like you said, so they never know where the food is coming from. And, you know, like I said, it's an honor. It's a rare privilege. And I love how in the article it says every president since Truman has formed close relationships and connections with the flight crew. I wonder before that where they just ignored. Right. Look away. But apparently Harry Truman ushered in chumming up with these people because he's from Missouri. He's from Missouri. And when you get the president on board Air Force One, that is when you're going to find a

more relaxed, more human president, especially if you have a good flight doctor. That's right. The end. The end. You got any more? Nope. That's Air Force One. Remember, we work for a website called howstuffworks.com. And every single article with the exception of what maybe one or two, every single episode that we record has been based on an article on the site. And if you want to read more about Air Force One, especially if you like your howstuffworks articles to be filled with conjecture, you're going to love this one. Just type in Air Force One in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com. And that's going to bring up the article. And I said handy and search bar, which means it's going to be a particularly good listener now. That's right, Josh. This is going

to be, I'm going to call this baronese follow up. We did our now annual reading. Gotta do it twice for it to be annual. Yeah. At first, it's just an odd girl. People say first annual, though. It's just not right. So our now second annual Halloween reading, where we read royalty-free works of literature that are creepy. And people like this one. Yeah, I think so. I thought we get some like, well, I didn't like that one. Not one person has said it. Not so far, at least. So this year, we read Baronese by Edgar Allan Poe, and we had a couple of follow-ups. You remember at the end, we sort of tried to figure out what happened. Yeah. Sean writes in, I'm sure you've gotten a few of these. As I read the story, Baronese had a kind of epilepsy that

left her comatose and in a deathlike state from this quote, a trance very nearly resembling positive dissolution. Makes sense. Of course, when you're reading this, sometimes it escapes you because you're trying to read it well. Right. So everyone did think she was dead and she was buried. He didn't hallucinate anything. In his mania, he dug her up, ripped out her teeth, and then that act woke her from her trance, hence the screaming that wounded but alive Baronese and the blood all over our narrator. Pro, she didn't wake up buried alive to die a slow suffocating death. Con, definitely no more steak dinners in her future. That's from Sean. And then the second one, I have to say the protagonist loved her enough as a friend. He would have cut her steak and

or chewed it up and spit it in her mouth. This is from Julie and Julie. Remember, I didn't have the French translation and we had quite a few people send it in, but hers was the best version I thought. I just finished listening to Baronese. Thanks for keeping up the creepy short story tradition. I have to admit, I was more than a little excited to hear that you didn't know the meaning of the French phrases because I can finally use my random French degree. Here's a translation. Of Madame Waselle Saul, it had been well said that all her steps were feelings. And of Baronese, I more seriously believed that all her teeth were ideas. The ideas. So here's what Julie thinks it means.

Madame Waselle Saul was a famous French ballet dancer in the 1730s. Someone, perhaps her great admirer Voltaire, you've heard of him, probably describes her graceful ballet as creating feelings with every step. Igeus was so overwhelmed with all the imaginative thoughts. That's the protagonist. Yeah, which were provoked by her teeth that he felt like each tooth was a source of a new idea. I think she's right on the money. Personally, I think old Eddie was showing off and probably pretty tripped out, but that's part of his charm. And that is from Julie. That's nice. Those are two like top not stellar fan mails. They weren't even fan mails. Those

were listener mails. That's right. Yeah, they're no fans. No, they're just smart people. If you're a smart person who wants to tell us something you think we'd like to know, we'd like to know just about anything. So that's cool. Send it in. Any thoughts you have, any ramblings. Although we did get one recently. Did you notice it? I can't remember what it was about, but it was a rambling. Was it? Yeah, I don't remember what it was, but it was probably from a smart person because it was a stuff you should know listener. That's right. You can tweet to us at syskpodcast. You can go under our Facebook, facebook.com slash stuff you should know. And you can also send us a good old fashion email at stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. Be sure to check out our new video podcast,

Stuff from the Future. Join How Stuff Works staff as we explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff, stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call, like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola que tal mi gente. It's Chiquis from Chiquis and Chill Podcast. Welcome to the show. I talk about anything and everything. I did have a

miscarriage when I was 19 years old. And that's why I'm a firm believer and an advocate of therapy and counseling. The person that you saw on stage, the person that you saw in interviews, that was my mother offstage. Acompanyame every Monday on my podcast, Chiquis and Chill, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.