January 9, 2014 • 35 mins
Up in the Air: How long can a bird stay in the air? How about an airplane? From human flight to the future of laser-powered drone aircraft, the answers may surprise you in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. And be sure to click here for a mini-gallery of birds and planes featured in this episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what's the longest flight, continuous flight you've ever taken in
your life? In reality or in my mind? Well, that's
that's both, okay, I don't know. Nine hours yeah, to London,
(00:28):
I believe, and in my mind I've been on a
hot air balloon journey for a while. Yeah, yeah, well
that's the hot air balloon journey sounds a lot more
romantic and a lot a lot smoother. I mean, you're
just gliding. You're up there in a basket. I'm assuming
there's a second basket that might have, you know, some
nice bread in it or something, and a panda bear
to keep me company. And well that out it sounds
(00:48):
really dangerous. You're gonna be mauled and you're gonna have
to jump half laid for your life storybook panda Okay, yeah,
talks and stuff of course, what about you? Um, definitely
my flights to Asia either. And I the thing is
like once the once a flight is long enough, it
(01:09):
becomes eternally long it becomes long in a way that
ours can't really measure it, so counting in um both
the length of the flight and the uh the factors
of the flight, I would say the flight home from
China with my son and my wife, that was say
(01:30):
so that was that was the longest plane, right, I've
ever been on. But in this episode titled up in
the Air, we're gonna be talking about other lengthy flights,
lengthy flights by humans, lengthy flights by birds, lengthy flights
by robots. And I was really astounded by some of
the information we're going to discuss in this episode because
some of this I was already familiar with. I was
new about some of the records, some of the technology,
(01:52):
but other things just completely came out a left field
for me. Yeah, and I think this is one of
those topics that's always gonna be fascinating to us because
we would all like the hour of flight, and we've
been trying to attain it from time memorial. And I
was actually thinking about a later example, but again a
hot air balloon example of the moncal Fhier brothers who
created the first hot air balloon, and I thought, Ah,
(02:15):
if only I could go back in time to September
nineteen three, two first Sigh, where one of these hot
air balloons carried a sheep, a rooster, and a duck
and flew for eight minutes in front of Louis the
sixteenth Marine Antoinette and of course the French court. I
mean that must have seemed like just alchemy and and
(02:37):
all sorts of magic. Well to the people under the sheep.
But I bet the rooster and the duck we're probably
not as impressed, because they're like, all right, oh flight,
oh great, even invented flight. That's great humans. Because but
back to your point, humans have always obviously craved flight.
We've we've we've stood there, we've invented things, we've we've
made weapons and tools, and then we look up and
(02:57):
the birds are flying all overhead, and we're like, I
want that too. Feels like nothing, all those intentions feel
like zero. And for ages and ages and ages that
was forbiddness. We might try to strap together some sort
of wingsuit, and then we'd fall off a cliff and
die or hardly injure ourselves. And and and we and
we just can't help but envy those birds. Um, there's
a great YouTube clip that's been going around recently up
(03:18):
and it's it's I believe it's a European and Russian
origin where someone's just turning their camera out the window
and they're they're filming this crow. We've discussed crows before,
highly intelligent birds tool users. And this bird is taking
like a a little dish or a lens cap or something,
and it's on the slanted roof covered with snow, and
(03:38):
it will take this little, uh, this little makeshift sled
up to the top and it will ride the sled
down and then it'll drag it back up and write
it down again. And I was talking to my wife
about this, and she she's like, she says, well, why
is this crow doing this? Like, doesn't crow know that
he can fly? He's here, he is wasting his time sledding,
and sledding is the thing we do as as land
based creatures to try and just get a tape east
(04:00):
of what it might be to fly. I think that
crow is just throwing it in our faces. Right, not
only can I fly, but I can slid? I think
so too. All right, let's look at some of these
showoffs in the animal world here. Yeah, because it's Again,
it's one thing to say, all right, birds can fly, obviously,
but how long can they fly? How how long can
they keep their feet up off the ground? How long
(04:20):
can they just exist in that that that nether world
between solid surface and in the sky and exceedingly long time.
And we're gonna look at the Alpine swift. This is
a small bird each way, it's less than a quarter
of a pound, and they spend the summer breeding in
Europe and they migrate to Africa for the winter thousands
of miles away. Yeah, the Alpine swift is pretty crazy
(04:42):
because we're talking about a one thousand, two forty mile
flight carried out by three Alpine swifts. Longest recorded flight
made by any bird, uh recently tracked. I want to
use two hundred days in the air no stop. It
seems it seems like it was a NonStop flight. Um.
The reason we know this is that there is a
(05:02):
team of scientists who strapped tiny electronic monitoring devices to
six alpine swifts before they flew south for the winter.
They recaptured three of them and they looked at this
data and they were astounded. Now, the thing about this
is that these tags only collect data every four minutes,
So it's impossible to rule out the chance that they
touched down occasionally, but every single one of the data
(05:25):
points collected for more than six months in a row
indicated that at the time they were either actively flying
or gliding in the air. Yeah. The gliding is key,
because that's basically what they're doing, uh, instead of resting
at night, based on the data, they're gliding, and then
they're they're eating and drinking in the air as well,
presumably according at the Swiss research. Yeah, this is so cool.
They were making meals of airborne playing them bugs and
(05:48):
spiders swept into the sky by high winds, and then
they slaked their thirst by just skimming the water in
rivers and oceans. I mean, that's that's eating on the
run there. Yeah, I've I have run across the information
about the number of insects that you will have swept
up and had rather high altitudes before, but I had
not really put one and two together that, oh there
(06:10):
might be birds coming through that can not only snack
on that, but depend on it during a very long
distance flight. Yeah, I mean that is fast food for
that animal. Now, another bird that deserves mentioned here is
the bar tailed Godwit just because the sheer distance involved here. Uh.
In two thousand seven, a female god with was found
(06:31):
to have flown seven thousand miles or eleven thousand, five
hundred kilometers NonStop from Alaska to New Zealand. So that's
without taking a break for food or drink yep, and
that is in just nine days. The US Geological Survey
and pr BO Conservation Science they outfitted sixteen of these
birds with satellite transmitters to study god with migration, trying
(06:54):
to figure out exactly how long they were out there. Now,
one of these birds, which they easy It flew six
thousand forty miles directly to UH, this wetland area on
the border of North Korea and China. So there it
touches down, has a very brief rest, and then continues
the remaining three thousand miles to Alaska. But then the
return trip NonStop UH seven thousand miles fly to New
(07:19):
Zealand uninterrupted. Now she she benefited from tail winds on
that and UH. And of course you want to about
the sleep, like, how do you possibly get any rest? Well,
this comes back to an old topic of discussed before
Uni him is spheric sleep. You dare not put the
whole brain to rest for the night because you are flying,
just put half of it to rest, right, And and
(07:40):
they found out that she burned up huge stores of fat,
more than fifty of her body weight that she had
piled on at the start of her journey in Alaska.
So it's be prepared to not rest, and be be
prepared to sleep one half of the mind at a time,
and be prepared to lose a lot of weight. Indeed, now,
the reason they wanted to look at this is because
the uh the Godwit migration has decreased from the mid
(08:03):
nineties from one hundred and fifty thousand birds a year
to seventy thousands. So it's thought that development along the
Yellow Sea between China and North and South Korea is
depriving the birds of vital food sources since those mud
flats and wetlands are drained for development. And this is huge.
It's wiped out half the population. So examples like that
are are amazing. And also again that it's it's another
(08:25):
case where we kind of look at the example of
the bird and and it kind of makes us a
little jealous because even even other examples of birds that
just flies off for the winter. Uh you look at
I mean, you might be a person who realizes, hey,
I've never left the state, I've never left the city,
or I've certainly never left this country of this hemisphere.
And here's a bird, just a stupid old bird, and
it's doing it every year, or smart old birds or
(08:46):
a smart, smart old bird. But but they're probably being
a little judge, you know, you think, is that why
they're always trying to to squirt their guana on our heads? Oh,
the people are being judge that the birds they're not.
I don't know. Are you implying that the people who
hate words are always trying to Yeah, you don't see
them like just off of ledges where they're going on.
(09:08):
There you go. On that note, let's take a break.
When we get back, we're going to talk about how
humans have tried to engineer your own crazy length of cliffe.
All right, we're back, and we're going to talk about
the longest human flight on record. And i'd like to
think about the next example is really trying to embrace
(09:32):
our spirit animal by naming this airship the snowbird. Yeah,
you're talking about the ZPG two airship Snowbird. Uh, and
this was back in when the ZPG two airship took
off from South Weymouth near Boston, Massachusetts, under the command
(09:53):
of Commander Jack our Hunt. And uh where did it go? Well,
it went to Sunny Key West, Florida. Eleven d days
later it landed there and it logged an amazing nine
thousand four miles or two hundred two kilometers. We're talking
about two hundred sixty four point two hours. And can
you imagine how surreal it would be to be in
(10:14):
that airship for eleven days? I I can because I
have I've often seeing like images of the old the
old Zeppelins particularly and where I've watched the second Indiant
know it's the third Indiana Jones movie that has the
you know, the neat scenes of the Zeppelin or that
I think there's an old old Michael York film called
Zeppelin has some some nice classy scenes as well, where
(10:35):
it does look just instantly attractive because you're talking a
very smooth ride where I mean they say that you
could take an eat pin or a fountain pen and
you could stand it up on the table and it
would just remain there just because everything was so still
and so smooth, and you're you're flying NonStop. Yeah, this
fabulous castle in the sky, the closest that you probably
(10:57):
would ever get to, like hitching a ride on a cloud. Now,
in an airplane, it's gonna be harder to replicate that experience,
especially if you're dealing with very long distances, um, and
especially if you are crammed in with humanity. Yes. Now,
in terms of commercial flights, we talked to the beginning,
you know, what are the longest commercial flights we've been on.
(11:17):
If you try to come to a book a commercial
flight just for the purposes of having a really long flight,
Let's say there's something really wrong with you and you
you just crave an excruciating amount of time and an
airplane like cycled air. Yeah, what's the most damage you
could do to your psyche with one trip NonStop? Well, formally, uh,
we had a real humdinger in the Newark to Singapore
(11:40):
flight on Singapore Airlines, which was an eighteen hour, fifty
minute flight that covered nine thousand five miles or fifteen thousand,
three d forty five KOs. That one was cut out
because it just, uh, it just wasn't It wasn't financially viable.
You're talking about a lot of fuel. You're talking about
a pretty stiff journey that just isn't gonna be um
(12:01):
aplical to everybody. Yeah, and you just missed your chance
because this was just in November that they stopped this service.
Now you can still count on quantas though to fly
you from Sydney to Dallas in fifteen hours and twenty
five minutes. It's a mere eight thousand, five of the
eight miles or thousand, eight hundred and four kilometers. Still
(12:22):
a pretty hefty flight. So I would be very interested
to hear from anyone who's listening to this podcast who
has taken either of those flights. Or you could just
get stranded on our tarmac for five hours, in which
case you enter to dog time and everything is like
seven times longer. That's true. Anytime you're flying commercially, you're
you have to factor in all that extra time that
(12:43):
you're spending just you know, waiting around at transfers or
getting to the airport dealing with delays. Now, by the bye,
the shortest flight in the world, just so you know,
is between the two Orkney Islands in Scotland. This is
the Westray and pop up Westray Islands just north of Scotland,
and they are separated by a distance of only one
(13:03):
point seven miles or two point seven kilometers. Operated by
logan are the flight duration is officially two minutes long,
but under ideal wind conditions, it can be completed in
only forty seven seconds. Wow, that's pretty short. Yep. Take
thirty bucks a pop. There's obviously ah no in flight service.
That's pretty good. That's a good deal, isn't it. How
(13:25):
would you do it just for the experience of skipping
to another island in in a minute? Yeah? You know,
I forget how long the flight was from Oahu to
the Big Island in Hawaii. I did that once, and
that's a I'm not dealing with a big distance there,
but definitely it took more than a minute. Well, and
I find those types of little puddle jumpers to be
(13:47):
an entirely different experience for time because for me it
slows down. It may only be a fifteen minute johnp
but it feels like two hours, just because you're so
aware of being in a tin metal can in the
middle of the air exactly now with we're talking about
commercial flights, So that's one area of of long distance flying.
(14:09):
Another huge areas, of course, military flight distance, where especially
when you're dealing with bombers, the idea that you you
can and will have the ability to deliver um a
payload to virtually anywhere on Earth. UM. So the military
flight distance currently still goes to the the American B
fifty two and this for this is a particular record,
(14:31):
you have to go back to UH January seven, when
three fifty two b s made a non stuff flight
around the world during Operation Power Flight that's spelled al
f l I t E. For some reason, I'm not
sure why they went with that, but I'm not gonna
I'm not gonna disagree with them because the B fifty
two is are pretty impressive. In this particular UM exercise,
they covered thirty nine a thousand, one hundred and sixty
(14:54):
five kilometers or one forty five nautical miles or twenty
four thousand, three hundred normal miles in forty five hours
nineteen minutes. UH. There were several in flight refuelings, which
of course is key. Everyone's seen this the footage of
this before, where you have the refueling plane and then
you have another plane being a jet fighter or a bomber,
(15:15):
and there's this wonderful magic, almost romantic mating of the
two planes. Yeah, the docking uh in in the the
end of the hose if you want to call it
that has has yes, call that has a has has
the these wing surfaces on it to help maneuver it
into place. Um, if you ever played flight simulators, you're
you're very familiar with this. And so obviously that allows
(15:38):
a plane to stay in the air longer because instead
of the plane having to land for new resources, you
just bring the resources up to it, very much like
our bird friends who are able to eat spiders on
the fly and then deal with the plankton and all.
So obviously this, uh, this whole exercise was just to demonstrate, hey,
we can fly atomic payloads all over the world. To
(15:59):
put it all of this in a mode and perspective
about you know, what kind of reach capacity the military
has the these days. Back in two thousand eleven, B
two stealth jets made twenty five hour, eleven thousand, five
hundred mile bombing missions from Whiteman Air Force Base in
Missouri to Libya and back again. Okay, so by today's standards,
the B fifty two still stands up here. It's pretty impressive. Yeah,
(16:21):
then that's why we still the United States still uses there.
It's a very tested, time tested uh UM piece of
military technology, very dependable. Okay, now let's talk about longest
endurance flight non refueled, and we're talking about the Routon Voyager.
Nine days, three minutes and forty four seconds twenty six thousand,
(16:41):
three hundred sixty six miles or forty two thousand, four
and thirty two kilometers took place between December four in
December twenty three and nineteen six. Yeah, and this is
a definite third category of of human uh piloted flight records.
Because we had the commercial, we had military, and then
this is this isn't a whole area where people cram
(17:03):
themselves into very uncomfortable aircraft that are that it's all
about just gaming the technology as much as possible. But
because the Routan Voyager essentially is someone sitting around and saying,
what what would we have to build to to just
push this record to the very limits. While you'd have
to build something that's lightweight and is virtually a flying
fuel tank, and that's what the Routan Voyager was. Yeah,
(17:27):
this is sort of the flight junkie flight obsessive here,
and the Routon was actually piloted by two crew members,
Dick Routon and Gina Yeager, no relation to Chuck Yeager. Incidentally, interestingly,
you have two icons of flight with the same less name,
no relation. Although some eaglemen might say that one of
them influenced the other, it's true, right so consciously and said, oh,
(17:49):
I need to get on that. Uh. Dick's brother Bert
Ruton designed the plane, and the Voyager was built in Mojave, California.
It took five years to build and test the airplane
before taking off on its record setting flight. Yeah, and
it had seventeen fuel tanks. Seventeen fuel tanks, and the
pilot would have to shift fuel from tank to tank
during flight to keep things even down because otherwise, you
(18:11):
you know, you'd get lopsided. Because this is a very
very balanced aircraft. Really a very beautiful aircraft. Um it looks.
Do look up a picture of it because it is uh,
you know, very long wings, very almost ephemeral, like you
you feel like you could break it just by looking
at a picture of it. It does look really delicate.
And here they went on this epic flight in it um.
(18:34):
Now some of the details of what this consisted of,
what this journey consisted of, as reported in a Only
Times article that came out in six Uh. It was
really interesting because it really drives home just how how
little human comfort factored into this, uh, this exercise, but
it is an endurance flight. Uh. That they had like
(18:54):
no room to sleep there. They had like half of
an inflatable mattress that they had tried I had to
create by by cutting one in half and stitching it up,
but it didn't hold air. And and then this is
this roar of air outside of the vehicle the whole time.
And then when it comes to using the bathroom. Uh,
they had like a like a cup with a straw
(19:15):
that they were able to funnel the liquids outside of
the plane. And then they had just bags for the
solid waste, which they were going to throw out the
plane as well, but but the one hole they had
to throw it out of the bags wouldn't fit, so
they just had to stay in the plane for the
whole trip. Uh. And they didn't even have diaper genies
back then, you know, they couldn't contain the funk with that. Oh,
and then when it came to eating, they this was
(19:35):
really fascinating to think of too. So they had they
had food, but they didn't even dream that they were
going to be able to heat anything up. But then
during the course of the flight, they realized that this
is aluminum pipe the channels warm air from the engine
compartment into the cockpit to keep everything toasty. And they
found that they could wrap the foil packets of food
around the pipe and then wrap a towel around it
(19:56):
for installation, and they heat the food. You know what
I love about this is um going to talk about
this in our next episode about creativity, but we talked
about um or. We've been looking a lot about innovation
and uncertainty and obsessiveness, and here is a great example.
I mean, people who probably most people would have stopped
halfway into the logistics of what you just described and
(20:16):
so forget it. I'm gonna be you know, sitting around
with pooh bags and you know, peeing and directing this
into a straw. Yeah, And the whole time they're not
they're not getting enough sleep because it's very difficult to
sleep on board. So you're you're you're fighting, you're struggling
to stay awake while you're you're piloting the aircraft and
they're flying around the world, so you're not dealing with
(20:37):
with consistent weather. You're, for instance, you're having to deal
with a massive typhoon which they managed to avoid being
destroyed by and actually benefit a little bit from the
tail winds. And then they're denied airspace Overlibias, so that
also means they have to have to go around that.
And I mean, it was just such a colossal undertaking.
It's easy to miss that if you just sort of
(20:58):
catch the you know, in your peripheral understanding of the
news story. Oh, some people build a crazy plain and
they flew around the world in a big deal. No,
it's it's essentially they climbed a mountain here. I remember
reading something recently about how interesting it is that humans
are hardwired to really take on fear and uh to
try to take on that in a way that they
(21:21):
can adapt to it as quickly as possible, and how
we keep putting ourselves in situations where we can keep
gravitating to the middle of our comfort and really essentially
putting ourselves in discomforting positions. This is such a good
example of that of how can I go out on
this extreme limb, survive in it, be successful, and somehow
(21:42):
find the stasis within it all. Yeah, I mean it's
it's really a testament to what we can do. Now
at this point, we're going to get into the longest
refueled endurance flight. Now, if you're like me, because I
went into the into a into answering this question without
knowing the answer. So I was thinking, all right, it's
gonna be on one hand, it's gonna be some endurance
dudes who built some crazy playing with solar panels or something,
(22:06):
and uh, and and that's going to be the record breaker,
or I think thought more likely it's some sort of
you know, it's a B fifty two or B thirty six, Uh,
you know, Strategic Air Command kind of mission from the
Cold War where they just had some sort of bomber
with the nuclear payload just up there, you know, circling
the Arctic for for days and days on end. So
I was prepared for either of those two possibilities. But
(22:27):
the reality of our our longest endured endurance that refueled
flight is really more mundane. Well, I actually was, Um,
I thought it was more It was interesting because it
was a lot about theatrics in terms of refueling. Part
will get to that. But also the Vegas angle I
did not realize was a part of this. Now this
(22:48):
is the says No. One seventy two Hacienda, and this
was named Hacienda after a I believe it was a
hotel in Las Vegas, a sponsor the flight. So it's
it's it's not uh, you know, you know, atomic power
or or the championship of the human spirit solely that
are that are driving this particular record, but good old
(23:10):
fashioned capitalism and advertising. Yeah, and then this is by
the way, and as we all know from from our
bugsy flix, Las Vegas was really trying to establish itself
as a tourist destination, so it had, of course all
these sorts of things that it was pulling out. In
terms of theatrics. Now we are talking about sixty four days,
twenty two hours, and nineteen minutes and five seconds, more
(23:33):
than one hundred and fifty thousand miles. So can you
imagine spending two months in a Sessna and flying twenty
four hours a day without even landing for fuel, Because
this is key. It got fuel, but it never landed. Yeah,
this is and this is a very unremarkable plane. I mean,
it's a plane, so it's remarkable. Obviously it flies, and
it can fly for sixty days straight, uh with with
(23:55):
with refueling, but it's it's very much the kind of
plane that if you just went to your local airport
in the fifties you would have seen normal people could
potentially own this airplane. It wasn't experimental, it wasn't military,
just a civilian plane. But what it did was like
cert slay stuff. Um, you know in sal Yeah, this
is Robert tim and John Cook. They're the ones who
(24:17):
took off in this thing, uh, doing this promotional stunt.
And uh and again that distance six times around the
world is the equivalent. They didn't fly around the world.
They just flew around the channel area. Um and uh
and and so what are they gonna do to refuel
this What can they possibly do to get more fuel
in this plane on a regular basis because they're not
going to get there's no air to air refueling, certainly,
(24:38):
not not for not for a Cessna, not for for
these two guys. So what they do is they end
up running formations with a ground vehicle on a remote
stretch of highway near blythe California. Uh So they just
kind of mcgivered it. They devised a way to to
to hook onto a hose and pump the fuel up
into a tank that they installed on planes belly. Yeah,
(25:01):
twice a day gallons of fuel into the belly tank,
and food and water and other supplies were lifted up
from the truck as well. Now, it took them several
tries to get this right. So they tried it once
and they had They had to bail. They tried it
a second time, had to bail, third time had to bail.
The fourth try proved to be the charm. But by
that point, like nobody was paying attention to the pr
(25:23):
They're like, oh, these guys are gonna try and break
the endurance record again. You know who cares. So it
wasn't until they've been up forty or fifty days that
everyone started paying attention to them again. I'm thinking about
after that point, maybe fifty days. That's when people in
that general area were like, that circular white path is
driving me crazy. They keep buzzing by once a day,
(25:45):
and by some accounts, they're really kind of lucky. They
didn't crash and die, because I mean the whole time
like that, there are times apparently where one would wake
up and find the other one dozing off the controls.
They've just flown off in some random direction. I mean again,
luckily they're not trying to fly around the world. They're
not dealing with with typhoons and uh in in enemy airspace.
But they are flying in a plane over the over
(26:08):
the ground. Uh, they were very lucky not to die.
Now Matt Pipkin and his dad Check are now working
to find a suitable aircraft, likely Assessna want to try
to break the record and in doing so to raise
money in awareness for sexual abuse victims with their nonprofit
which is called Speak Your Silence. And instead of flying
(26:31):
circular paths, they want to chart across country path hoping
to draw more attention as they pass over each location. Yeah,
and I can see that being more of a thing,
you know, you can sort of like watching the space
station and go over, except a little more visible. Because
they they're these guys trying to to break this record.
Uh So currently they have not done it yet. So
(26:52):
by the time you listen to this podcast, who knows,
maybe they will have completed this, maybe they actually beat
this longstanding record record. Yeah, they are slated to fly
or they're hoping to buy Summer. Of course, they have
to raise all the funds to do this, and they've
been trying to put it together for years. So it's
it's you know, I hope they get it off the
ground literally, but but we'll see. Yeah, and if you
(27:13):
want to check out that nonprofit again, it is speak
your silence, all right. So we've talked about birds, We've
talked about planes that are piloted by human beings. But
of course we live in an amazing and at times
frightening new age of U A. V's of robotic airplanes
that fly around and uh and fly all over the world.
(27:36):
In fact, we just had a news item not too
long ago about the possibility of Amazon dot Com using
drones to deliver packages. So it would make sense that
you would start to look at these drones and uh,
these unmanned flights and solar power and see what you
can figure out. Yeah, because solar power, of course is
a great option for this because I think back to
(27:57):
the voyager that was a situation where he had a
very light plane. Uh, it only concerns were the fuel
to keep it going and just the bare minimum for
human survival aboard it and human piloting of it. Is
this the Routon voyager, you have Ruton voyager. So in
this case, so if you if you take the humans
out of the scenario, all right, you don't have to
that's a lot of rooms saved, right there, a lot
(28:18):
of worries. You don't have to worry about the pilot
falling asleep or or having trouble going to the bathroom
or what have you. And then if you take the
fuel out of the scenario, the onboard fuel in the
term in the in the form of of of gasoline,
that illipens it up even more and allow exactly you
get to create basically a flying solar panel in the
(28:39):
form of the Zephyr created by the company of quinty Q.
Again it's a drone, it's a robotic airplane. It's you know,
very light, and it has all the solar panels on
top of it. And UH. The interesting record that it's
set here for for the longest ua V flight was
was that it flew for UM July nine did July
(29:02):
over the us UH kicking off at the Army's a
hum approving ground in Arizona. It clocked three thirty six
hours twenty two minutes, or fourteen days a couple of
weeks in the year. What I love about this is
that it has such high technology and you know, you've
got these recharged lithium soul for batteries, you've got the
solar panels. But it took five people to handle launch
(29:24):
it at the test range before it could actually reach
an altitude of seventy thousand feet and then began to
use the solar panels on the plane's wings and ultimately
it didn't stay up near as long as two guys
in assessment with some help from you from some dudes
on the ground in a truck. But it's it's important
because this maybe the future. There's a there's a company
(29:46):
called Tightened Aerospace. It's also very much involved in the
development of aircraft like this, and they're eyeing a five
year fly that's what they're they're they're hoping for, hoping
to manufacture this. Uh uh, This the special UIV with
three thousand solar panels. And a huge advantage here is
that this would essentially be a cheaper and more environmentally
friendly alternative to a satellite, because if you want to
(30:09):
get a satellite up there to uh, you know, if
you're monitoring something, if you're spying on something, or or
you know, some sort of communications technology needs to be
deployed at a at a high altitude. Satellites are expensive
and the only way to send that payload up there
is on the uh, the other end of an enormous
explosion that is pumping out all sorts of bad stuff
(30:31):
into the atmosphere. Yeah. Now, the next one on our list,
which actually is our last one, is so sci fi.
I love it. It is actually beamed laser power. And
what we're talking about is that in two thousand and twelve,
Tom Nugent's company, Laser Motive, they beamed enough energy to
a seventeen point five pound drone's Lockheed Martin Stalker to
(30:52):
keep it airborne at least forty eight hours, about forty
six hours longer than they drunk and usually fly. And
it was a demonstration of the lasers are capabilities. There's
no prototype yet. Yeah, this is a really awesome technology
now in the concept alone of wireless energy transmission. This
has been for around for a little while, uh, the
(31:12):
technology has just been kind of catching up with this. Uh.
For instance, as far as using microwave energy to transfer
that that that power to a flying uh vessel like
that's been around for a while. We've proven that technology.
But the problem there is the the the greater the
distance between the microwave emission and the recipient vehicle, the
(31:33):
less power is going to be transmitted. So it would
be super helpful. If all you wanted was a drone
to circle your skyscraper or something, you can just microwave
that energy too, and it's fine. But if you're sending
a drone out on a on a long mission, uh,
the laser technology, that's where the advantage is. Because you're
gonna have persistent power. Uh. You still will have to worry,
you know about the environmental factors about whether, etcetera. But
(31:55):
you wouldn't have to have regular microwave energy stations spread
out over over a certain distance. You could have far
fewer laser transmission centers that would be lasering that power
right to the drone. Yeah. NuGen actually told Popular Mechanics
that it's like plugging a system into a wall, taking
that electricity and converting it to light and transmitting that
light through open air to a receiver which converts the
(32:17):
light back into electricity, and the laser system can transfer
only about electricity it takes from its ground source. But
drones like the Stocker don't require a huge amount of energy,
and in that June test, its batteries held more energy
after the test than when it began, So it may
be something that actually works very well for the sort
(32:37):
of scenario. And certainly when you start combining laser emitted
energy with solar energy for a drone and you're seeing
the best of both worlds it can get. It can
feast on solar energy when that's available, and when it's not,
you can you can deal with the direct beamed energy
and vice versa, depending on which is easier to deploy.
You're also satisfying your eight year old nacy of a
(33:01):
remote control like behemoth in the air. Yeah, I mean
kind of a light behemoth, very spread out, very very elegant. Um.
It's really it is really phenomenal to to envision this,
this potential future where maybe we get a little less
dependent upon straight up satellites and more on these, uh,
(33:21):
these sort of ephemeral drones that are just soaring through
the air, feasting off of solar energy, and also this
crazy laser energy that we're beaming up to you know,
I was thinking about that as we talked about satellites.
I think it us in the Satellite Junkies episode and
we talked about, at least in the US, how there
are not nearly as many satellites up or plans to
(33:42):
put them up, and how that would impact us adversely
in terms of weather and um all sorts of intelligence
gathering capability. So this might be a really good alternative,
and we look even further into the future. This idea
of of laser energy also factors into our potential to
put up stay solar energy harvesting satellites in space and
(34:04):
then beaming the energy back to Earth or back to
some other space station, moon station, you name it, as
well as a as a potential means of propelling solar
sale spacecraft vast distances through the Cosmos. Uh In the
solar sales thing's just an elegant idea in the first place,
and we have done an episode on that as well
as to check it out. So there you go, just
(34:24):
a crash course in the question how long can I
go to stay in the air. How long can a
bird stay in the air? How long can a man
made craft stay in the air with or without humans
aboard it? Yeah, and how long was the great oz
up in the hot air balloon? Anyway, that's a valid question, right,
someone's figured that out. Somebody's probably applied the mess to this. Well. Hey,
(34:46):
if you want to check out more on this than
other topics, if you want to see what we're blogging about,
you want to listen to other podcast episodes, particularly, you
want to find that that that solar sale episode we
were talking about as an older episode, you probably won't
find it on iTunes. You need to go to stuff
to bow your Mind dot time. That's where we have
all the archives everything you could possibly want, including links
out to our various social media accounts. We have what
(35:07):
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Go check it out. Go familiarize yourself with with us
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You can just send us an email. You can do
so at below the Mind at discovery dot com. For
(35:29):
more on this and thousands of other topics, says it
How Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuff to blow your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
what's the longest flight, continuous flight you've ever taken in
your life? In reality or in my mind? Well, that's
that's both, okay, I don't know. Nine hours yeah, to London,
(00:28):
I believe, and in my mind I've been on a
hot air balloon journey for a while. Yeah, yeah, well
that's the hot air balloon journey sounds a lot more
romantic and a lot a lot smoother. I mean, you're
just gliding. You're up there in a basket. I'm assuming
there's a second basket that might have, you know, some
nice bread in it or something, and a panda bear
to keep me company. And well that out it sounds
(00:48):
really dangerous. You're gonna be mauled and you're gonna have
to jump half laid for your life storybook panda Okay, yeah,
talks and stuff of course, what about you? Um, definitely
my flights to Asia either. And I the thing is
like once the once a flight is long enough, it
(01:09):
becomes eternally long it becomes long in a way that
ours can't really measure it, so counting in um both
the length of the flight and the uh the factors
of the flight, I would say the flight home from
China with my son and my wife, that was say
(01:30):
so that was that was the longest plane, right, I've
ever been on. But in this episode titled up in
the Air, we're gonna be talking about other lengthy flights,
lengthy flights by humans, lengthy flights by birds, lengthy flights
by robots. And I was really astounded by some of
the information we're going to discuss in this episode because
some of this I was already familiar with. I was
new about some of the records, some of the technology,
(01:52):
but other things just completely came out a left field
for me. Yeah, and I think this is one of
those topics that's always gonna be fascinating to us because
we would all like the hour of flight, and we've
been trying to attain it from time memorial. And I
was actually thinking about a later example, but again a
hot air balloon example of the moncal Fhier brothers who
created the first hot air balloon, and I thought, Ah,
(02:15):
if only I could go back in time to September
nineteen three, two first Sigh, where one of these hot
air balloons carried a sheep, a rooster, and a duck
and flew for eight minutes in front of Louis the
sixteenth Marine Antoinette and of course the French court. I
mean that must have seemed like just alchemy and and
(02:37):
all sorts of magic. Well to the people under the sheep.
But I bet the rooster and the duck we're probably
not as impressed, because they're like, all right, oh flight,
oh great, even invented flight. That's great humans. Because but
back to your point, humans have always obviously craved flight.
We've we've we've stood there, we've invented things, we've we've
made weapons and tools, and then we look up and
(02:57):
the birds are flying all overhead, and we're like, I
want that too. Feels like nothing, all those intentions feel
like zero. And for ages and ages and ages that
was forbiddness. We might try to strap together some sort
of wingsuit, and then we'd fall off a cliff and
die or hardly injure ourselves. And and and we and
we just can't help but envy those birds. Um, there's
a great YouTube clip that's been going around recently up
(03:18):
and it's it's I believe it's a European and Russian
origin where someone's just turning their camera out the window
and they're they're filming this crow. We've discussed crows before,
highly intelligent birds tool users. And this bird is taking
like a a little dish or a lens cap or something,
and it's on the slanted roof covered with snow, and
(03:38):
it will take this little, uh, this little makeshift sled
up to the top and it will ride the sled
down and then it'll drag it back up and write
it down again. And I was talking to my wife
about this, and she she's like, she says, well, why
is this crow doing this? Like, doesn't crow know that
he can fly? He's here, he is wasting his time sledding,
and sledding is the thing we do as as land
based creatures to try and just get a tape east
(04:00):
of what it might be to fly. I think that
crow is just throwing it in our faces. Right, not
only can I fly, but I can slid? I think
so too. All right, let's look at some of these
showoffs in the animal world here. Yeah, because it's Again,
it's one thing to say, all right, birds can fly, obviously,
but how long can they fly? How how long can
they keep their feet up off the ground? How long
(04:20):
can they just exist in that that that nether world
between solid surface and in the sky and exceedingly long time.
And we're gonna look at the Alpine swift. This is
a small bird each way, it's less than a quarter
of a pound, and they spend the summer breeding in
Europe and they migrate to Africa for the winter thousands
of miles away. Yeah, the Alpine swift is pretty crazy
(04:42):
because we're talking about a one thousand, two forty mile
flight carried out by three Alpine swifts. Longest recorded flight
made by any bird, uh recently tracked. I want to
use two hundred days in the air no stop. It
seems it seems like it was a NonStop flight. Um.
The reason we know this is that there is a
(05:02):
team of scientists who strapped tiny electronic monitoring devices to
six alpine swifts before they flew south for the winter.
They recaptured three of them and they looked at this
data and they were astounded. Now, the thing about this
is that these tags only collect data every four minutes,
So it's impossible to rule out the chance that they
touched down occasionally, but every single one of the data
(05:25):
points collected for more than six months in a row
indicated that at the time they were either actively flying
or gliding in the air. Yeah. The gliding is key,
because that's basically what they're doing, uh, instead of resting
at night, based on the data, they're gliding, and then
they're they're eating and drinking in the air as well,
presumably according at the Swiss research. Yeah, this is so cool.
They were making meals of airborne playing them bugs and
(05:48):
spiders swept into the sky by high winds, and then
they slaked their thirst by just skimming the water in
rivers and oceans. I mean, that's that's eating on the
run there. Yeah, I've I have run across the information
about the number of insects that you will have swept
up and had rather high altitudes before, but I had
not really put one and two together that, oh there
(06:10):
might be birds coming through that can not only snack
on that, but depend on it during a very long
distance flight. Yeah, I mean that is fast food for
that animal. Now, another bird that deserves mentioned here is
the bar tailed Godwit just because the sheer distance involved here. Uh.
In two thousand seven, a female god with was found
(06:31):
to have flown seven thousand miles or eleven thousand, five
hundred kilometers NonStop from Alaska to New Zealand. So that's
without taking a break for food or drink yep, and
that is in just nine days. The US Geological Survey
and pr BO Conservation Science they outfitted sixteen of these
birds with satellite transmitters to study god with migration, trying
(06:54):
to figure out exactly how long they were out there. Now,
one of these birds, which they easy It flew six
thousand forty miles directly to UH, this wetland area on
the border of North Korea and China. So there it
touches down, has a very brief rest, and then continues
the remaining three thousand miles to Alaska. But then the
return trip NonStop UH seven thousand miles fly to New
(07:19):
Zealand uninterrupted. Now she she benefited from tail winds on
that and UH. And of course you want to about
the sleep, like, how do you possibly get any rest? Well,
this comes back to an old topic of discussed before
Uni him is spheric sleep. You dare not put the
whole brain to rest for the night because you are flying,
just put half of it to rest, right, And and
(07:40):
they found out that she burned up huge stores of fat,
more than fifty of her body weight that she had
piled on at the start of her journey in Alaska.
So it's be prepared to not rest, and be be
prepared to sleep one half of the mind at a time,
and be prepared to lose a lot of weight. Indeed, now,
the reason they wanted to look at this is because
the uh the Godwit migration has decreased from the mid
(08:03):
nineties from one hundred and fifty thousand birds a year
to seventy thousands. So it's thought that development along the
Yellow Sea between China and North and South Korea is
depriving the birds of vital food sources since those mud
flats and wetlands are drained for development. And this is huge.
It's wiped out half the population. So examples like that
are are amazing. And also again that it's it's another
(08:25):
case where we kind of look at the example of
the bird and and it kind of makes us a
little jealous because even even other examples of birds that
just flies off for the winter. Uh you look at
I mean, you might be a person who realizes, hey,
I've never left the state, I've never left the city,
or I've certainly never left this country of this hemisphere.
And here's a bird, just a stupid old bird, and
it's doing it every year, or smart old birds or
(08:46):
a smart, smart old bird. But but they're probably being
a little judge, you know, you think, is that why
they're always trying to to squirt their guana on our heads? Oh,
the people are being judge that the birds they're not.
I don't know. Are you implying that the people who
hate words are always trying to Yeah, you don't see
them like just off of ledges where they're going on.
(09:08):
There you go. On that note, let's take a break.
When we get back, we're going to talk about how
humans have tried to engineer your own crazy length of cliffe.
All right, we're back, and we're going to talk about
the longest human flight on record. And i'd like to
think about the next example is really trying to embrace
(09:32):
our spirit animal by naming this airship the snowbird. Yeah,
you're talking about the ZPG two airship Snowbird. Uh, and
this was back in when the ZPG two airship took
off from South Weymouth near Boston, Massachusetts, under the command
(09:53):
of Commander Jack our Hunt. And uh where did it go? Well,
it went to Sunny Key West, Florida. Eleven d days
later it landed there and it logged an amazing nine
thousand four miles or two hundred two kilometers. We're talking
about two hundred sixty four point two hours. And can
you imagine how surreal it would be to be in
(10:14):
that airship for eleven days? I I can because I
have I've often seeing like images of the old the
old Zeppelins particularly and where I've watched the second Indiant
know it's the third Indiana Jones movie that has the
you know, the neat scenes of the Zeppelin or that
I think there's an old old Michael York film called
Zeppelin has some some nice classy scenes as well, where
(10:35):
it does look just instantly attractive because you're talking a
very smooth ride where I mean they say that you
could take an eat pin or a fountain pen and
you could stand it up on the table and it
would just remain there just because everything was so still
and so smooth, and you're you're flying NonStop. Yeah, this
fabulous castle in the sky, the closest that you probably
(10:57):
would ever get to, like hitching a ride on a cloud. Now,
in an airplane, it's gonna be harder to replicate that experience,
especially if you're dealing with very long distances, um, and
especially if you are crammed in with humanity. Yes. Now,
in terms of commercial flights, we talked to the beginning,
you know, what are the longest commercial flights we've been on.
(11:17):
If you try to come to a book a commercial
flight just for the purposes of having a really long flight,
Let's say there's something really wrong with you and you
you just crave an excruciating amount of time and an
airplane like cycled air. Yeah, what's the most damage you
could do to your psyche with one trip NonStop? Well, formally, uh,
we had a real humdinger in the Newark to Singapore
(11:40):
flight on Singapore Airlines, which was an eighteen hour, fifty
minute flight that covered nine thousand five miles or fifteen thousand,
three d forty five KOs. That one was cut out
because it just, uh, it just wasn't It wasn't financially viable.
You're talking about a lot of fuel. You're talking about
a pretty stiff journey that just isn't gonna be um
(12:01):
aplical to everybody. Yeah, and you just missed your chance
because this was just in November that they stopped this service.
Now you can still count on quantas though to fly
you from Sydney to Dallas in fifteen hours and twenty
five minutes. It's a mere eight thousand, five of the
eight miles or thousand, eight hundred and four kilometers. Still
(12:22):
a pretty hefty flight. So I would be very interested
to hear from anyone who's listening to this podcast who
has taken either of those flights. Or you could just
get stranded on our tarmac for five hours, in which
case you enter to dog time and everything is like
seven times longer. That's true. Anytime you're flying commercially, you're
you have to factor in all that extra time that
(12:43):
you're spending just you know, waiting around at transfers or
getting to the airport dealing with delays. Now, by the bye,
the shortest flight in the world, just so you know,
is between the two Orkney Islands in Scotland. This is
the Westray and pop up Westray Islands just north of Scotland,
and they are separated by a distance of only one
(13:03):
point seven miles or two point seven kilometers. Operated by
logan are the flight duration is officially two minutes long,
but under ideal wind conditions, it can be completed in
only forty seven seconds. Wow, that's pretty short. Yep. Take
thirty bucks a pop. There's obviously ah no in flight service.
That's pretty good. That's a good deal, isn't it. How
(13:25):
would you do it just for the experience of skipping
to another island in in a minute? Yeah? You know,
I forget how long the flight was from Oahu to
the Big Island in Hawaii. I did that once, and
that's a I'm not dealing with a big distance there,
but definitely it took more than a minute. Well, and
I find those types of little puddle jumpers to be
(13:47):
an entirely different experience for time because for me it
slows down. It may only be a fifteen minute johnp
but it feels like two hours, just because you're so
aware of being in a tin metal can in the
middle of the air exactly now with we're talking about
commercial flights, So that's one area of of long distance flying.
(14:09):
Another huge areas, of course, military flight distance, where especially
when you're dealing with bombers, the idea that you you
can and will have the ability to deliver um a
payload to virtually anywhere on Earth. UM. So the military
flight distance currently still goes to the the American B
fifty two and this for this is a particular record,
(14:31):
you have to go back to UH January seven, when
three fifty two b s made a non stuff flight
around the world during Operation Power Flight that's spelled al
f l I t E. For some reason, I'm not
sure why they went with that, but I'm not gonna
I'm not gonna disagree with them because the B fifty
two is are pretty impressive. In this particular UM exercise,
they covered thirty nine a thousand, one hundred and sixty
(14:54):
five kilometers or one forty five nautical miles or twenty
four thousand, three hundred normal miles in forty five hours
nineteen minutes. UH. There were several in flight refuelings, which
of course is key. Everyone's seen this the footage of
this before, where you have the refueling plane and then
you have another plane being a jet fighter or a bomber,
(15:15):
and there's this wonderful magic, almost romantic mating of the
two planes. Yeah, the docking uh in in the the
end of the hose if you want to call it
that has has yes, call that has a has has
the these wing surfaces on it to help maneuver it
into place. Um, if you ever played flight simulators, you're
you're very familiar with this. And so obviously that allows
(15:38):
a plane to stay in the air longer because instead
of the plane having to land for new resources, you
just bring the resources up to it, very much like
our bird friends who are able to eat spiders on
the fly and then deal with the plankton and all.
So obviously this, uh, this whole exercise was just to demonstrate, hey,
we can fly atomic payloads all over the world. To
(15:59):
put it all of this in a mode and perspective
about you know, what kind of reach capacity the military
has the these days. Back in two thousand eleven, B
two stealth jets made twenty five hour, eleven thousand, five
hundred mile bombing missions from Whiteman Air Force Base in
Missouri to Libya and back again. Okay, so by today's standards,
the B fifty two still stands up here. It's pretty impressive. Yeah,
(16:21):
then that's why we still the United States still uses there.
It's a very tested, time tested uh UM piece of
military technology, very dependable. Okay, now let's talk about longest
endurance flight non refueled, and we're talking about the Routon Voyager.
Nine days, three minutes and forty four seconds twenty six thousand,
(16:41):
three hundred sixty six miles or forty two thousand, four
and thirty two kilometers took place between December four in
December twenty three and nineteen six. Yeah, and this is
a definite third category of of human uh piloted flight records.
Because we had the commercial, we had military, and then
this is this isn't a whole area where people cram
(17:03):
themselves into very uncomfortable aircraft that are that it's all
about just gaming the technology as much as possible. But
because the Routan Voyager essentially is someone sitting around and saying,
what what would we have to build to to just
push this record to the very limits. While you'd have
to build something that's lightweight and is virtually a flying
fuel tank, and that's what the Routan Voyager was. Yeah,
(17:27):
this is sort of the flight junkie flight obsessive here,
and the Routon was actually piloted by two crew members,
Dick Routon and Gina Yeager, no relation to Chuck Yeager. Incidentally, interestingly,
you have two icons of flight with the same less name,
no relation. Although some eaglemen might say that one of
them influenced the other, it's true, right so consciously and said, oh,
(17:49):
I need to get on that. Uh. Dick's brother Bert
Ruton designed the plane, and the Voyager was built in Mojave, California.
It took five years to build and test the airplane
before taking off on its record setting flight. Yeah, and
it had seventeen fuel tanks. Seventeen fuel tanks, and the
pilot would have to shift fuel from tank to tank
during flight to keep things even down because otherwise, you
(18:11):
you know, you'd get lopsided. Because this is a very
very balanced aircraft. Really a very beautiful aircraft. Um it looks.
Do look up a picture of it because it is uh,
you know, very long wings, very almost ephemeral, like you
you feel like you could break it just by looking
at a picture of it. It does look really delicate.
And here they went on this epic flight in it um.
(18:34):
Now some of the details of what this consisted of,
what this journey consisted of, as reported in a Only
Times article that came out in six Uh. It was
really interesting because it really drives home just how how
little human comfort factored into this, uh, this exercise, but
it is an endurance flight. Uh. That they had like
(18:54):
no room to sleep there. They had like half of
an inflatable mattress that they had tried I had to
create by by cutting one in half and stitching it up,
but it didn't hold air. And and then this is
this roar of air outside of the vehicle the whole time.
And then when it comes to using the bathroom. Uh,
they had like a like a cup with a straw
(19:15):
that they were able to funnel the liquids outside of
the plane. And then they had just bags for the
solid waste, which they were going to throw out the
plane as well, but but the one hole they had
to throw it out of the bags wouldn't fit, so
they just had to stay in the plane for the
whole trip. Uh. And they didn't even have diaper genies
back then, you know, they couldn't contain the funk with that. Oh,
and then when it came to eating, they this was
(19:35):
really fascinating to think of too. So they had they
had food, but they didn't even dream that they were
going to be able to heat anything up. But then
during the course of the flight, they realized that this
is aluminum pipe the channels warm air from the engine
compartment into the cockpit to keep everything toasty. And they
found that they could wrap the foil packets of food
around the pipe and then wrap a towel around it
(19:56):
for installation, and they heat the food. You know what
I love about this is um going to talk about
this in our next episode about creativity, but we talked
about um or. We've been looking a lot about innovation
and uncertainty and obsessiveness, and here is a great example.
I mean, people who probably most people would have stopped
halfway into the logistics of what you just described and
(20:16):
so forget it. I'm gonna be you know, sitting around
with pooh bags and you know, peeing and directing this
into a straw. Yeah, And the whole time they're not
they're not getting enough sleep because it's very difficult to
sleep on board. So you're you're you're fighting, you're struggling
to stay awake while you're you're piloting the aircraft and
they're flying around the world, so you're not dealing with
(20:37):
with consistent weather. You're, for instance, you're having to deal
with a massive typhoon which they managed to avoid being
destroyed by and actually benefit a little bit from the
tail winds. And then they're denied airspace Overlibias, so that
also means they have to have to go around that.
And I mean, it was just such a colossal undertaking.
It's easy to miss that if you just sort of
(20:58):
catch the you know, in your peripheral understanding of the
news story. Oh, some people build a crazy plain and
they flew around the world in a big deal. No,
it's it's essentially they climbed a mountain here. I remember
reading something recently about how interesting it is that humans
are hardwired to really take on fear and uh to
try to take on that in a way that they
(21:21):
can adapt to it as quickly as possible, and how
we keep putting ourselves in situations where we can keep
gravitating to the middle of our comfort and really essentially
putting ourselves in discomforting positions. This is such a good
example of that of how can I go out on
this extreme limb, survive in it, be successful, and somehow
(21:42):
find the stasis within it all. Yeah, I mean it's
it's really a testament to what we can do. Now
at this point, we're going to get into the longest
refueled endurance flight. Now, if you're like me, because I
went into the into a into answering this question without
knowing the answer. So I was thinking, all right, it's
gonna be on one hand, it's gonna be some endurance
dudes who built some crazy playing with solar panels or something,
(22:06):
and uh, and and that's going to be the record breaker,
or I think thought more likely it's some sort of
you know, it's a B fifty two or B thirty six, Uh,
you know, Strategic Air Command kind of mission from the
Cold War where they just had some sort of bomber
with the nuclear payload just up there, you know, circling
the Arctic for for days and days on end. So
I was prepared for either of those two possibilities. But
(22:27):
the reality of our our longest endured endurance that refueled
flight is really more mundane. Well, I actually was, Um,
I thought it was more It was interesting because it
was a lot about theatrics in terms of refueling. Part
will get to that. But also the Vegas angle I
did not realize was a part of this. Now this
(22:48):
is the says No. One seventy two Hacienda, and this
was named Hacienda after a I believe it was a
hotel in Las Vegas, a sponsor the flight. So it's
it's it's not uh, you know, you know, atomic power
or or the championship of the human spirit solely that
are that are driving this particular record, but good old
(23:10):
fashioned capitalism and advertising. Yeah, and then this is by
the way, and as we all know from from our
bugsy flix, Las Vegas was really trying to establish itself
as a tourist destination, so it had, of course all
these sorts of things that it was pulling out. In
terms of theatrics. Now we are talking about sixty four days,
twenty two hours, and nineteen minutes and five seconds, more
(23:33):
than one hundred and fifty thousand miles. So can you
imagine spending two months in a Sessna and flying twenty
four hours a day without even landing for fuel, Because
this is key. It got fuel, but it never landed. Yeah,
this is and this is a very unremarkable plane. I mean,
it's a plane, so it's remarkable. Obviously it flies, and
it can fly for sixty days straight, uh with with
(23:55):
with refueling, but it's it's very much the kind of
plane that if you just went to your local airport
in the fifties you would have seen normal people could
potentially own this airplane. It wasn't experimental, it wasn't military,
just a civilian plane. But what it did was like
cert slay stuff. Um, you know in sal Yeah, this
is Robert tim and John Cook. They're the ones who
(24:17):
took off in this thing, uh, doing this promotional stunt.
And uh and again that distance six times around the
world is the equivalent. They didn't fly around the world.
They just flew around the channel area. Um and uh
and and so what are they gonna do to refuel
this What can they possibly do to get more fuel
in this plane on a regular basis because they're not
going to get there's no air to air refueling, certainly,
(24:38):
not not for not for a Cessna, not for for
these two guys. So what they do is they end
up running formations with a ground vehicle on a remote
stretch of highway near blythe California. Uh So they just
kind of mcgivered it. They devised a way to to
to hook onto a hose and pump the fuel up
into a tank that they installed on planes belly. Yeah,
(25:01):
twice a day gallons of fuel into the belly tank,
and food and water and other supplies were lifted up
from the truck as well. Now, it took them several
tries to get this right. So they tried it once
and they had They had to bail. They tried it
a second time, had to bail, third time had to bail.
The fourth try proved to be the charm. But by
that point, like nobody was paying attention to the pr
(25:23):
They're like, oh, these guys are gonna try and break
the endurance record again. You know who cares. So it
wasn't until they've been up forty or fifty days that
everyone started paying attention to them again. I'm thinking about
after that point, maybe fifty days. That's when people in
that general area were like, that circular white path is
driving me crazy. They keep buzzing by once a day,
(25:45):
and by some accounts, they're really kind of lucky. They
didn't crash and die, because I mean the whole time
like that, there are times apparently where one would wake
up and find the other one dozing off the controls.
They've just flown off in some random direction. I mean again,
luckily they're not trying to fly around the world. They're
not dealing with with typhoons and uh in in enemy airspace.
But they are flying in a plane over the over
(26:08):
the ground. Uh, they were very lucky not to die.
Now Matt Pipkin and his dad Check are now working
to find a suitable aircraft, likely Assessna want to try
to break the record and in doing so to raise
money in awareness for sexual abuse victims with their nonprofit
which is called Speak Your Silence. And instead of flying
(26:31):
circular paths, they want to chart across country path hoping
to draw more attention as they pass over each location. Yeah,
and I can see that being more of a thing,
you know, you can sort of like watching the space
station and go over, except a little more visible. Because
they they're these guys trying to to break this record.
Uh So currently they have not done it yet. So
(26:52):
by the time you listen to this podcast, who knows,
maybe they will have completed this, maybe they actually beat
this longstanding record record. Yeah, they are slated to fly
or they're hoping to buy Summer. Of course, they have
to raise all the funds to do this, and they've
been trying to put it together for years. So it's
it's you know, I hope they get it off the
ground literally, but but we'll see. Yeah, and if you
(27:13):
want to check out that nonprofit again, it is speak
your silence, all right. So we've talked about birds, We've
talked about planes that are piloted by human beings. But
of course we live in an amazing and at times
frightening new age of U A. V's of robotic airplanes
that fly around and uh and fly all over the world.
(27:36):
In fact, we just had a news item not too
long ago about the possibility of Amazon dot Com using
drones to deliver packages. So it would make sense that
you would start to look at these drones and uh,
these unmanned flights and solar power and see what you
can figure out. Yeah, because solar power, of course is
a great option for this because I think back to
(27:57):
the voyager that was a situation where he had a
very light plane. Uh, it only concerns were the fuel
to keep it going and just the bare minimum for
human survival aboard it and human piloting of it. Is
this the Routon voyager, you have Ruton voyager. So in
this case, so if you if you take the humans
out of the scenario, all right, you don't have to
that's a lot of rooms saved, right there, a lot
(28:18):
of worries. You don't have to worry about the pilot
falling asleep or or having trouble going to the bathroom
or what have you. And then if you take the
fuel out of the scenario, the onboard fuel in the
term in the in the form of of of gasoline,
that illipens it up even more and allow exactly you
get to create basically a flying solar panel in the
(28:39):
form of the Zephyr created by the company of quinty Q.
Again it's a drone, it's a robotic airplane. It's you know,
very light, and it has all the solar panels on
top of it. And UH. The interesting record that it's
set here for for the longest ua V flight was
was that it flew for UM July nine did July
(29:02):
over the us UH kicking off at the Army's a
hum approving ground in Arizona. It clocked three thirty six
hours twenty two minutes, or fourteen days a couple of
weeks in the year. What I love about this is
that it has such high technology and you know, you've
got these recharged lithium soul for batteries, you've got the
solar panels. But it took five people to handle launch
(29:24):
it at the test range before it could actually reach
an altitude of seventy thousand feet and then began to
use the solar panels on the plane's wings and ultimately
it didn't stay up near as long as two guys
in assessment with some help from you from some dudes
on the ground in a truck. But it's it's important
because this maybe the future. There's a there's a company
(29:46):
called Tightened Aerospace. It's also very much involved in the
development of aircraft like this, and they're eyeing a five
year fly that's what they're they're they're hoping for, hoping
to manufacture this. Uh uh, This the special UIV with
three thousand solar panels. And a huge advantage here is
that this would essentially be a cheaper and more environmentally
friendly alternative to a satellite, because if you want to
(30:09):
get a satellite up there to uh, you know, if
you're monitoring something, if you're spying on something, or or
you know, some sort of communications technology needs to be
deployed at a at a high altitude. Satellites are expensive
and the only way to send that payload up there
is on the uh, the other end of an enormous
explosion that is pumping out all sorts of bad stuff
(30:31):
into the atmosphere. Yeah. Now, the next one on our list,
which actually is our last one, is so sci fi.
I love it. It is actually beamed laser power. And
what we're talking about is that in two thousand and twelve,
Tom Nugent's company, Laser Motive, they beamed enough energy to
a seventeen point five pound drone's Lockheed Martin Stalker to
(30:52):
keep it airborne at least forty eight hours, about forty
six hours longer than they drunk and usually fly. And
it was a demonstration of the lasers are capabilities. There's
no prototype yet. Yeah, this is a really awesome technology
now in the concept alone of wireless energy transmission. This
has been for around for a little while, uh, the
(31:12):
technology has just been kind of catching up with this. Uh.
For instance, as far as using microwave energy to transfer
that that that power to a flying uh vessel like
that's been around for a while. We've proven that technology.
But the problem there is the the the greater the
distance between the microwave emission and the recipient vehicle, the
(31:33):
less power is going to be transmitted. So it would
be super helpful. If all you wanted was a drone
to circle your skyscraper or something, you can just microwave
that energy too, and it's fine. But if you're sending
a drone out on a on a long mission, uh,
the laser technology, that's where the advantage is. Because you're
gonna have persistent power. Uh. You still will have to worry,
you know about the environmental factors about whether, etcetera. But
(31:55):
you wouldn't have to have regular microwave energy stations spread
out over over a certain distance. You could have far
fewer laser transmission centers that would be lasering that power
right to the drone. Yeah. NuGen actually told Popular Mechanics
that it's like plugging a system into a wall, taking
that electricity and converting it to light and transmitting that
light through open air to a receiver which converts the
(32:17):
light back into electricity, and the laser system can transfer
only about electricity it takes from its ground source. But
drones like the Stocker don't require a huge amount of energy,
and in that June test, its batteries held more energy
after the test than when it began, So it may
be something that actually works very well for the sort
(32:37):
of scenario. And certainly when you start combining laser emitted
energy with solar energy for a drone and you're seeing
the best of both worlds it can get. It can
feast on solar energy when that's available, and when it's not,
you can you can deal with the direct beamed energy
and vice versa, depending on which is easier to deploy.
You're also satisfying your eight year old nacy of a
(33:01):
remote control like behemoth in the air. Yeah, I mean
kind of a light behemoth, very spread out, very very elegant. Um.
It's really it is really phenomenal to to envision this,
this potential future where maybe we get a little less
dependent upon straight up satellites and more on these, uh,
(33:21):
these sort of ephemeral drones that are just soaring through
the air, feasting off of solar energy, and also this
crazy laser energy that we're beaming up to you know,
I was thinking about that as we talked about satellites.
I think it us in the Satellite Junkies episode and
we talked about, at least in the US, how there
are not nearly as many satellites up or plans to
(33:42):
put them up, and how that would impact us adversely
in terms of weather and um all sorts of intelligence
gathering capability. So this might be a really good alternative,
and we look even further into the future. This idea
of of laser energy also factors into our potential to
put up stay solar energy harvesting satellites in space and
(34:04):
then beaming the energy back to Earth or back to
some other space station, moon station, you name it, as
well as a as a potential means of propelling solar
sale spacecraft vast distances through the Cosmos. Uh In the
solar sales thing's just an elegant idea in the first place,
and we have done an episode on that as well
as to check it out. So there you go, just
(34:24):
a crash course in the question how long can I
go to stay in the air. How long can a
bird stay in the air? How long can a man
made craft stay in the air with or without humans
aboard it? Yeah, and how long was the great oz
up in the hot air balloon? Anyway, that's a valid question, right,
someone's figured that out. Somebody's probably applied the mess to this. Well. Hey,
(34:46):
if you want to check out more on this than
other topics, if you want to see what we're blogging about,
you want to listen to other podcast episodes, particularly, you
want to find that that that solar sale episode we
were talking about as an older episode, you probably won't
find it on iTunes. You need to go to stuff
to bow your Mind dot time. That's where we have
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(35:07):
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(35:29):
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