As air travel has evolved over the years, those lengthy flights across the Atlantic have gotten shorter.
Still, with the longest commerical flight in the world taking 18 hours and 40 minutes to fly from New York JFK Airport to Singapore Changi Airport, it's not exactly a quick trip.
Things could've been very different if Concorde had remained in action, but after the entire fleet was grounded in 2003 amidst safety a concerns and a post-9/11 slump, we're back to doing it the traiditonal way.
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With the record for the world's longest continuous flight belonging to Robert Timm and John Cook, we have to go all the way back to 1959 to learn their story.
Some 65 years ago, Timm and Cook flew a four-seater aircraft over Las Vegas for a jaw-dropping 64 days, 22 hours and 19 minutes.
The owner of Las Vegas' Hacienda hotel suggested that one of its employees fly a plane boasting its name and try to break the flight endurance record.
Even back then, the record was nearly 47 days in the air (being set in 1949).
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Timm was a former World War II fighter pilot but has since taken on a career as a slot machine repairman. He was given $100,000 to create the event, which was also tied to a cancer research fundraiser.
For those worried about how cramped it would be up in the Cesna 172 aircraft, Janet Bednarek, an aviation historian and professor at the University of Dayton, explained to CNN Travel: "It was a relatively new design. It’s a roomy four-seater airplane and it was known for being reliable and fairly easy to fly – something you don’t have to pay attention to every moment. And when you're doing long duration, you want an airplane that’s just going to kind of hum along there."
Timm's modifications included removing most of the interior fittings to save weight, installing a rudimentary autopilot, adding a mattress, and even a small sink for hygiene.
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To keep them fed, meals from the Hacienda kitchen were mashed up and placed in Thermos flasks. As for their 'deposits', there was a foldable camp toilet, with bags of waste thrown out over the desert.
Bednarek points out that the biggest problem was refuelling: "There had been a lot of experiments up to this point with aerial refueling, but there really was no way to modify a Cessna 172 to be refueled in midair."
Saying that an extra tank was set up near a truck on the ground, the Cessna 172 would fly low while the truck drove along and winched up a hose that could refuel the airplane.
She adds: "It really was a dramatic show of airmanship, because they had to do it at night sometimes and that required some precision flying."
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Three of the attempts failed due to mechanical failures, and in one of them, Timm and a co-pilot were stranded in the air for 17 days.
Picking airplane mechanic John Cook for his fourth attempt, Timm again took to the skies on December 4, 1958.
By the time they broke the record on January 23, 1959, the plane's mechanical failures included the autopilot, electrical fuel pump, cabin heater, fuel gauge, and the landing lights.
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Keen to make sure no one else would break the record, they kept flying for another 15 days. In the end, they landed at McCarran Airport on February 7, 1959.
They'd flown nonstop for over two months and clocked up over 150,000 miles.
Bedernak concludes: "I think they’d reached the end of the rope and decided it wouldn’t have done them any good to crash, and so they came down. They were in pretty bad shape."
The story of Timm and Cook becomes more relevant thanks to a solar-powered drone called Zephyr almost beating their record in August 2022.
Operated by the US Army and by Airbus, Xephyr flew for an impressive 64 days, 18 hours and 26 minutes before it crashed in Arizona.
The drone was only four hours of breaking the longest flight record, but for now, Timm and Cook remain in the record books.