Aviation in numbers

This plane flew for 64 days straight. This is how pilots did it

You don’t board a plane thinking about aviation history. Few wonder what year was the safest to fly, how many lives were lost in the deadliest aviation disaster, or when passengers enjoyed the first in-flight movie. And have you ever wondered just how long the longest nonstop flight has lasted? Probably not, but aviation history is full of numbers, records, and quirks that are surprising to say the least. Here are 10 of them.

Today, you can take a flight that lasts from 18 to 24 hours. That’s long, but it’s nothing compared to the longest flight without touching the ground ever recorded. It happened in the winter of 1958, when Robert Timm, a former WWII pilot and slot machine mechanic from Las Vegas, convinced the owner of the Hacienda Hotel, Warren Bayley, to fund an attempt at the flight endurance record, hoping the publicity would draw more gamblers to the casino.

Timm and his co-pilot, John Cook, took off from McCarran Fields in a modified Cessna 172 nicknamed Hacienda on December 4, 1958, and did not land again until February 7, 1959. To stay aloft, a truck sped beneath them along a closed stretch of highway near Blythe, California, twice a day, pumping fuel up through a hose while ground crews passed food and supplies up in a bucket on a rope. When they finally landed, 64 days, 22 hours, and 19 minutes later, they had covered roughly 150,000 miles, and their record still stands today.

You may think of aviation’s worst tragedies happening high in the sky, but history’s deadliest one never left the ground.

On March 27, 1977, a bomb threat at Gran Canaria’s airport diverted several flights, including two Boeing 747s, to the smaller Los Rodeos Airport on the nearby island of Tenerife. As dense fog rolled in that afternoon, a KLM 747 began its takeoff roll, believing it had clearance, while a Pan Am 747 was still taxiing down the very same runway, hidden by the fog. The two aircraft collided at around 150 miles an hour, killing all 248 people aboard the KLM plane and 335 of the 396 aboard the Pan Am jet. The disaster, which claimed 583 lives in total, remains the deadliest accident in aviation history, and it led directly to major changes in cockpit communication procedures still used by every airline today.

Every time you book a flight, picking a seat can feel like a small bet on your own safety, even if the odds are overwhelmingly in your favor either way.

In 2023, aviation professor Doug Drury of Central Queensland University in Australia revisited a TIME magazine investigation published in 2015 that had analyzed 35 years of aircraft accident data to figure out which seats actually did best when something went wrong. The data showed that middle seats in the rear third of the plane had the lowest fatality rate, at 28% compared with 44% for aisle seats in the middle of the cabin. Drury explained the logic in an article for The Conversation, noting that having passengers seated on both sides provides a kind of human buffer, while seats near the wings sit closer to the fuel tanks. However, none of this changes the fact that flying remains extraordinarily safe.

Mid-flight movies today are almost a must for any long flight, but the first in-flight movie was an experiment that terrified its own organizers back in 1925.

That April, Imperial Airways loaded a 35 mm film projector and a screen onto a covered Handley Page bomber departing Croydon Aerodrome in London, despite the fact that the film stock of that time was made of highly flammable nitrate. The twelve passengers aboard watched The Lost World, a dinosaur adventure based on the novel by Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, who reportedly saw the film with his own family and enjoyed it. Since the half-hour flight took place in daylight, the pilot had to steer through clouds just to darken the cabin enough for the picture to be visible, while music was radioed in live from the Berlin Philharmonic to a single onboard speaker. Risky as it was, nothing caught fire, and the flight earned its place as the first in-flight movie in aviation history.

You may think a five-hour flight is endless, but imagine what passengers who buckle in for nearly a full day in the air must feel. On November 9, 2020, Singapore Airlines resumed the world’s longest scheduled nonstop commercial route, flying 15,349 kilometers between New York’s JFK Airport and Singapore’s Changi Airport.

The airline uses a specially modified Airbus A350-900 built for ultra-long range flying, with extra fuel tanks that push the aircraft’s endurance past 19 hours in the air. There’s no economy class on board, since the extra weight of additional seating would eat into the fuel capacity needed to make the distance. Passengers who book the route are essentially agreeing to spend the better part of a day and night airborne, covering a distance equivalent to more than 38,000 laps of a standard running track before touching down on the other side of the world.

Every time a plane crash makes the headlines, it feels like flying has gotten more dangerous, even though the statistics always say otherwise. However, 2023 was a remarkable year for aviation.

During that year, roughly 37.7 million commercial flights operated worldwide, and for the first time in recorded aviation history, not a single passenger died in a commercial jet crash anywhere on the planet. The one exception involved a turboprop plane in Nepal, which crashed and killed 68 passengers and four crew members, a tragedy that, in any case, falls into a separate category from large passenger jets due to differences in how those aircraft are built and regulated. Aviation safety experts pointed to decades of improvements in pilot training, aircraft design, and air traffic technology as the reasons behind the milestone.

If you’ve ever renewed a driver’s license, you know that feeling of being asked to prove that you can still see the road clearly. Now imagine doing that for an airplane, every year, for most of a century.

Clarence Cornish grew up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and first took to the skies in 1918 at age 19, training in a biplane during the final months of WWI. Cornish went on to manage Fort Wayne’s municipal airport, serve at the Army Air Forces headquarters during WWII, and become Indiana’s first director of its Aeronautics Commission. Starting in 1968, he began an annual tradition of renting a plane every year to fly over Indianapolis in honor of his first flight decades earlier. On December 4, 1995, Guinness World Records recognized him as the world’s oldest active pilot, at 97 years old. He died just 18 days later, having spent 77 years at the controls.

When you board a plane, you probably don’t think about whether you’ll fit in the seat. However, for Rumeysa Gelgi, a Turkish woman recognized by Guinness World Records as the tallest living woman at 7 ft, 0.7 inches, that simple act had never been possible.

In September 2022, Turkish Airlines arranged to change that, removing six economy seats across three rows on a flight from Istanbul to San Francisco and installing a stretcher so Gelgi could lie down for the 13-hour journey. Medical staff traveled with her to help manage the trip. Afterward, Gelgi posted online that the experience had been flawless from start to finish, and said it wouldn’t be her last flight, having waited 25 years for her first one.

Most 17-year-olds are focused on getting a driver’s license, not circling the entire planet by themselves. Mack Rutherford, born in June 2005, to a British father and Belgian mother, both pilots themselves, earned his own pilot’s license at just 15, making him the youngest licensed pilot in the world at the time.

Inspired by his older sister Zara, who had become the youngest woman to fly solo around the globe earlier that year, Mack departed from Sofia, Bulgaria, on March 23, 2022, in a small ultralight aircraft equipped with extra fuel tanks. Over the next five months, he crossed 52 countries and five continents, flying only in daylight and occasionally grounded by weather, before landing back in Sofia on August 24, 2022, almost a month after turning 17. The moment he stepped off the plane, his sister was there to hand him his own Guinness World Record certificate.

Step onto most Boeing 737 flights today, and chances are you’re boarding a plane built sometime in the last 15 years. That’s not the case for one particular aircraft still flying passengers and cargo through northern Canada.

Registered C-GNLK, this 737 rolled off Boeing’s assembly line in Renton, Washington, in 1974 and was delivered new to the Dutch carrier Transavia that same year. Over the following decades, it changed hands more than a dozen times, flying briefly for airlines in the U.S. before spending years in Europe. In 2014, the Canadian charter airline Nolinor Aviation acquired it, fitting it with a gravel kit that lets it land on unpaved runways in the country’s far north. More than 50 years after it left the factory, it remains by most accounts the oldest jet airliner still in active commercial service anywhere in the world.

Map of the strange: 10 unique places with crazy claims to fame

Some of the most fascinating spots on Earth are small towns and isolated enclaves that have claimed fame for reasons that are way out of the ordinary. From an English village emulating America’s Wild West to a desert outpost where streetlights are strictly forbidden, discover 10 of the world’s 10 craziest, most unexpectedly unique places.

In most parts of the world, a cemetery is a quiet place reserved for the deceased. But Cairo’s necropolis, in Egypt, is a different story. Spanning a four-mile grid of historic tombs, shrines, and mausoleums, this ancient burial ground is also a bustling, vibrant neighborhood home to hundreds of thousands of living residents.

Driven by Cairo’s population boom and a severe shortage of affordable housing starting in the mid-20th century, locals began moving into the quiet cemetery complexes. Today, families have converted gated tombs into functional homes, running electricity lines and water pipes right alongside historic graves. Picture children playing soccer between headstones and local vendors selling groceries outside medieval family vaults.

If you drive out to Portal, Arizona, near the New Mexico border, you’ll hit Arizona Sky Village, a desert outpost where everyone’s an astronomer. This highly specialized residential community was built from the ground up for one specific purpose: providing an unpolluted view of the night sky.

In Sky Village, the entire infrastructure revolves around dark-sky preservation. Homes are built with custom, low-impact architecture, and traditional streetlights are completely banned. Most houses feature their own private, dome-shaped observatories on the roof, making it a paradise for professional researchers, astrophotographers, and amateur stargazers who want to view distant galaxies from their own backyards.

Giethoorn is a fairytale village located in the northeastern Netherlands. Here, the roads are completely nonexistent, and the loudest sound you hear on your morning commute is the quacking of ducks or the gentle splashing of an oar.

Founded by settlers in the 13th century who dug extensive canals to transport peat through the marshlands, Giethoorn is accessible only by boat, foot, or bicycle. The village features over 150 historic wooden footbridges arching over pristine waterways, connecting beautiful cottages and manicured lawns. Residents move around using "whisper boats" powered by electric motors, creating an incredibly peaceful environment that looks like the background of a Vermeer painting.

You don’t need ancient history to put your town on the map; sometimes all it takes is a bit of fruit and incredible lungs. Eau Claire, Michigan, has proudly claimed the title of the cherry spitting capital of the world thanks to its annual International Cherry Pit Spitting Championship.

What started in 1974 as a quirky joke has evolved into an official, competitive international tournament. Every July, contestants from around the world travel to this small Michigan town, known for its premium sweet and tart cherries, to see who can spit a pit the furthest down an asphalt track. Fun fact: the current world record stands at 93 feet and 6.5 inches.

If you suffer from megalophobia (the fear of large objects), you might want to bypass Casey. Located in rural Illinois, Casey was a quiet, unassuming town with a struggling economy until 2011, when a local businessman decided to revitalize the area by building an enormous, fully functional wind chime.

That single spark ignited a town-wide obsession. Today, Casey boasts more than a dozen officially verified Guinness World Records for the "World's Largest" items. Walking down Main Street, you’ll find a multi-story wooden rocking chair, a colossal mailbox that visitors can actually walk inside to mail letters, a massive birdcage, and a golf tee taller than a house.

Deep within the misty forests of Transylvania lies Sighișoara, a fortified medieval town in Romania that stands as one of the most remarkably preserved architectural gems in Europe. Built by Saxon merchants in the 12th century, its colorful houses, cobblestone alleyways, and imposing watchtowers remain completely intact.

However, Sighișoara’s most relevant claim to fame is its direct connection to gothic lore. A modest house near the town’s Citadel Square is the documented birthplace of Vlad III, the notorious 15th-century ruler known as Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Have you ever imagined visiting a classic, dusty frontier settlement outside the United States? Hidden away behind a wall of dense trees in the green rolling hills of Kent, England, sits Laredo, an Old West town.

Founded in 1971, Laredo is a replica of an 1860s American frontier outpost, created entirely by a society of British Western enthusiasts. The private town features a fully styled saloon, a sheriff’s office with iron jail cells, a bank, a general store, and a stable. Members of the club even spend their weekends living strictly as historical reenactors, dressing in authentic period clothing, cooking over open fires, and staging mock gunfights. Visiting the town is by appointment only.

High up on the rugged cliffs north of Damascus sits a beautiful Syrian village with an unmatched cultural heritage. Maaloula is one of the last remaining places on Earth where residents still natively speak Western Aramaic, the ancient Semitic dialect spoken by Jesus Christ and his disciples two thousand years ago.

Because the village was geographically isolated inside a deep mountain gorge for centuries, the language survived the spread of Arabic across the region. Walking through the narrow, blue-painted alleys of Maaloula and listening to the locals converse feels like you are immersed in biblical antiquity.

When people think of Massachusetts sports heritage, they think of the Boston Red Sox or the invention of basketball in Springfield. Yet, very few realize that Holyoke, a city 8 miles north of Springfield, is the birthplace of volleyball.

In 1895, William G. Morgan, a physical education director at the local YMCA, realized that the newly invented game of basketball was too physically grueling for older corporate businessmen. Wanting an indoor sport that required less running but still provided a solid workout, Morgan blended elements of tennis, handball, and baseball to create a game he initially called "mintonette". It was later renamed volleyball due to the volleying nature of the play, and it was such a success that it eventually became an international Olympic sport.

Tucked away in the heart of the Istrian peninsula, in Croatia, is Hum, the world’s smallest town. While many places claim small-town charm, Hum holds the official Guinness World Record for having an entire urban infrastructure—roughly 100x35 meters—you can walk across in less than two minutes.

According to local folklore, Hum was built by giants who used the leftover stones from the building of larger cities along the coast. In actuality, the town is completely enclosed by ancient defensive stone walls built in the 11th century. Despite its microscopic size—it has a permanent population of around 20 to 30 residents—Hum functions as a legitimate town, complete with a mayor, a church, a local museum, and a single tavern serving traditional mistletoe brandy.