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Inside Mighty Machines
Inside Mighty Machines

Inside Mighty Machines

—Former NASA rocket engineer Chad Zdenek gets up close and personal with mega machines to reveal the engineering principles that make them operate. Alongside salvage teams as they take machines such as a 747 jumbo jet and a hovercraft apart piece by piece, Zdenek gets one last chance to decipher how each were built and the mechanics that made it unique. He also explores the impact of the inventions and how they changed history. A power plant's century-old boilers, turbines, condensers and generators, the North Sea's biggest oil rig, and a U.S. aircraft carrier are among other featured projects.
1 seasonDocumentary, ScienceTV-PG
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Season 16 of 6 Episodes

  • Former NASA engineer Chad Zdenek joins an aircraft-dismantling team in Mississippi as a Boeing 747 lands on the runway for the last time; Zdenek cuts his way through the cabin, cockpit and four jet engines to strip the plane into six million parts.

  • Chad Zdenek heads to North Carolina to dismantle and then implode the Buck Steam Station, a nearly 100-year-old coal power plant built in the 1920s, which, at its peak, burned up to 20,000 tons of coal per day and powered up to 1,000 homes.

  • Chad Zdenek joins a salvage team to tear apart the world's biggest hovercraft and reveal the engineering innovations that made it a legend of its time; Chad joins the crew of an LCAC, the U.S. Navy's state-of-the-art military hovercraft.

  • Chad Zdenek joins a team that is dismantling the North Sea's biggest oil rig; as the 400-foot-high monster is towed ashore, he reveals the story of how deep-water oil engineers raced to build an enormous machine to drill through the sea bed.

  • Chad Zdenek joins a team responsible for stripping down and rebuilding the biggest aircraft in the U.S. Air Force's arsenal, the Lockheed C5 Super Transporter; Chad sees how engineering overcame the design flaws that once grounded the C5 fleet.

  • Chad Zdenek follows the mechanics, engineers and sailors who maintain the USS Carl Vinson, a U.S. aircraft carrier that is at the forefront of military technology.
Inside Mighty Machines

More about Inside Mighty Machines

Former NASA rocket engineer Chad Zdenek gets up close and personal with mega machines to reveal the engineering principles that make them operate. Alongside salvage teams as they take machines such as a 747 jumbo jet and a hovercraft apart piece by piece, Zdenek gets one last chance to decipher how each were built and the mechanics that made it unique. He also explores the impact of the inventions and how they changed history. A power plant's century-old boilers, turbines, condensers and generators, the North Sea's biggest oil rig, and a U.S. aircraft carrier are among other featured projects.

Starring

Chad Zdenek

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