Aviation Facts

Larry Walters tied 42 weather balloons to his lawn chair and rose to 16,000 feet over Los Angeles.

Should there be a crash, Prince Charles and Prince William never travel on the same airplane as a precaution.

Today's top fuel dragsters take off with more force than the space shuttle.

The longest recorded flight of a chicken is 13 seconds!

There are only 14 blimps in the world.

A small airplane can fly backwards.

Originally, BMW was an airplane engine manufacturer.

The average economy airline meal costs the airline $4-15. The average first class meal: $100 or more.

The distress code 'Mayday' comes from the French for help me, M'Aide!

In 1972, Vesna Vulović, a Serbian flight attendant, survived a fall of 33,330 feet when her plane exploded over Czechoslovakia. She held the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute until her death in 2016.

There’s a company that provides private flights for individuals who want to join the “mile high club”. For $425.00 you get a 1 hour flight, chocolates, champagne, and a curtain.

French entertainer Michel Lotito ate an entire airplane piece by piece. It was a Cessna 150. He chewed through it over two years, swallowing bolts, the propeller, the seats, the wings. Across his career he consumed roughly nine tons of metal plus glass, batteries, and rubber tyres. Doctors said his stomach lining was twice the thickness of a normal person's.

A flock of Canada geese knocked out both engines of US Airways Flight 1549 roughly two minutes after takeoff. Captain Chesley Sullenberger had about three and a half minutes to save 155 lives. He landed on the Hudson River - and when NTSB later ran simulations with a realistic 35-second decision delay added, the return to LaGuardia crashed short of the runway. The river was the only choice. Every single person survived.

Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson holds a real airline pilot's license. On the 2016 world tour he captained Ed Force One, a leased Boeing 747 painted with a giant Eddie on the tail, flying the band, the crew, and 12 tons of gear through 36 countries. He earned a 747 type rating just to fly it.

A former Marine pilot in Peru, Indiana, bought a Vietnam-era Army Huey on eBay. The listing said it was not flyable. It was trailered 1,300 miles home from Maine, volunteers rebuilt it, and in 2007 it flew again. The nonprofit he and his brother started now flies three Hueys and has given more than 23,000 rides. The crew says a veteran is reunited with a Huey at every event.

Amelia Earhart's plane may have been hiding in plain sight for 89 years. A researcher spotted a strange shape in a Pacific lagoon in 2020. The same shape turns up in aerial photos from 1938, just months after Earhart disappeared. Researchers say its size and outline match the tail and wing of her plane. A Purdue-backed team sets sail July 28 to investigate.

Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager flew a plane built by volunteers in a Mojave Desert hangar. On takeoff, the fuel-heavy wings scraped the runway and the winglets broke off. They kept flying anyway. Nine days, three minutes and 44 seconds later, they landed after circling the entire globe nonstop. They had just 106 pounds of fuel left, only 1.5% of what they took off with. The plane now hangs in the Smithsonian.

The lion who roared before MGM movies once survived a plane crash. In 1927, the studio put Jackie in a cage behind the pilot of a small plane bound for New York. It went down in the Arizona backcountry, and both survived. Pilot Martin Jensen left Jackie his sandwiches, milk and water and walked four days to a ranch. When he finally reached a phone, MGM's first question was, "How's the lion?"

The US Army once bombed a volcano to save a town. In 1935, lava from Mauna Loa crept toward Hilo's water supply, and Army biplanes dropped twenty 600-pound bombs on the flow. The eruption ended within a week, though geologists doubt the bombs did it. One squadron on the raid already had a patch of bombs falling on a volcano, approved four years earlier. Its B-52 crews still wear it.

Jack Knight flew through a snowstorm as Congress weighed ending the Air Mail. He had a broken nose from a crash in Wyoming days earlier. Postal workers and farmers lit bonfires along his route. At one stop, the ground crew had already gone home. Knight circled until a watchman heard him and lit a flare. He flew 830 miles through the night, and Congress funded the Air Mail within days.

In 1971, a man named Dan Cooper hijacked a plane, extorted $200,000, parachuted into a stormy night, and vanished without a trace. The only clue ever found was $5,800 of the ransom, rotting on a riverbank years later.

In 1990, the cockpit windshield of British Airways Flight 5390 blew out at 17,400 feet. The captain was sucked halfway out of the aircraft. A flight attendant grabbed his legs and held on for 20 minutes while the co-pilot made an emergency landing. Everyone survived. The cause? 84 of 90 windshield bolts were the wrong size.

In 1987, American Airlines sold a lifetime unlimited first-class pass for $250,000. Steven Rothstein bought one. He flew over 10,000 flights. Breakfast in London, dinner in Tokyo. He even booked a fake passenger named "Bag Rothstein" to keep the adjacent seat empty. American Airlines estimates he cost them over $21 million before they revoked his pass — and handed him the termination letter at the gate.

UC Davis engineer David Phillips spotted a Healthy Choice promotion offering airline miles for pudding barcodes. He bought 12,150 cups for $3,140, earned 1.25 million frequent flyer miles, donated all the pudding to the Salvation Army, and claimed an $815 tax deduction. Adam Sandler's Punch-Drunk Love was based on him.