Giant Paper Airplane, Amish Buggy Theft And Broken Planes In This Week's Beyond Cars Roundup

Paper airplanes are wonderful. Few things made a boring middle school math class go by like crafting the perfect paper bird and hurling it at the head of your best buddy across the room. I always found there was one problem with paper airplanes: they’re just two damn small. Well, it seems someone else thought the same thing I did and decided to make what they claim is the world’s biggest paper airplane, and we thank them for their service. - Andy Kalmowitz Read More

Picture this: You’ve been relaxing on the red-eye from Paris to Toronto, hopping that jet stream from CDG to YYZ. It’s been a fairly uneventful flight, not much to complain about, aside from a crying baby a few rows away, a dude down the row thought it was a good idea to take off his shoes a few hours ago, and the person next to you is hogging the armrest. It’s just a flight. That is, until the pilot smacks the tail of the aircraft into the tarmac and has to turn around to give it another shot. - Bradley Brownell Read More

A Michigan woman allegedly stole a horse and buggy from an Amish couple while they shopped at a Walmart last weekend. The appeal of the crime is obvious — no USB cables to mess with, no sensors to fool, just hop in and go. Yet, if you’re looking to follow in this woman’s footsteps, a word of caution: The penalties for stealing a horse and buggy are much, much worse than just stealing a car. - Steve DaSilva Read More

If you’ve spent much time traveling the United States using the country’s vast network of interstates, it’s entirely possible that you’ve driven alongside or past a nuclear warhead and didn’t even know it. There are 5,244 of Uncle Sam’s nukes hiding around the world, most within the bounds of this nation’s borders, and they don’t always stay in the same place. More often than you’d think, these mass genocide devices get loaded into trucks and taken in for routine maintenance. - Bradley Brownell Read More

A Virgin Atlantic flight bound for New York City was canceled right before it was set to take off on January 15 after a passenger noticed that several screws were missing from the Airbus A330’s wing. Phil Hardy, a British traveler, was sitting onboard Virgin Flight 127 at Manchester Airport in England when he noticed four missing fasteners during the flight’s safety briefing, according to the New York Post. That’s when he decided to let the cabin crew know. - Andy Kalmowitz Read More

It’s been a rough month when it comes to air transportation. Since the start of the new year, we’ve seen everything from door plugs blowing off at 16,000 feet and airplanes colliding on runways to cracked windshields and people getting stuck in bathrooms. Lest we forget a flight I was on had a five-hour delay for reasons known only to God and Delta. - Andy Kalmowitz Read More

NASA scientists now know the ecstasy of unscrewing a stubborn fastener. For months, the last two screws on the lid of the container that held samples from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission had prevented researchers from accessing rocks and dust of the 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid Bennu. The screws simply wouldn’t budge and were in danger of becoming stripped, if not having done so already. Researchers had to develop and test special tools to finally undo the fasteners while preserving the integrity of the asteroid sample, according to NASA. - José Rodríguez Jr. Read More

In southern Florida, police are cracking down on a new environmental hazard: Derelict boats, left floating just offshore, that can leak pollutants into the local waterways. Yet, the focus of the effort doesn’t seem to be the boats themselves — instead, cops are more concerned about the unhoused people living aboard. - Steve DaSilva Read More

Train heists seem like the kind of crime left behind with wagon trails and high-noon duels, but the problem is a major headache in our modern world. A new fascinating deep dive by the New York Times shows just how this land piracy works, and what everyone from train companies to large corporations to the feds are doing about it. - Erin Marquis Read More

There’s pretty much just one rule to driving on an airport runway, and it’s “don’t hit shit.” A subset of that rule is the notion that the eighty-ton aircraft pretty much always has the right of way. Early on Monday morning an airport security staffer at Sydney International took a wrong turn in their company-issued Mitsubishi Triton pickup, running headlong into an empty Jetstar Airways Airbus getting a tow. The driver was transported to the hospital, but no major injuries were reported. - Bradley Brownell Read More