Inside Mighty Machines

The first Boeing 747 took to the sky in 1969 and changed the aviation industry forever. This iconic plane ushered in a new golden age of air travel, but now it's being grounded for good to make way for more modern, fuel-efficient aircraft. Host Chad Zdenek joins a dismantling team in Mississippi to help break down one of the retired planes and reveal the five engineering innovations that made this "Queen of the Skies" a record-breaker.

Host 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, was burning up to 20,000 tons of coal per day and powering up to a thousand homes. Before 300 explosive charges bring the plant down, cameras get inside the action as the century-old boilers, turbines, condensers and generators are torn apart, revealing how coal power helped build 20th-century America.

Southampton, on England's south coast, is the final home of what was once the biggest hovercraft ever built - the Princess Margaret. As crews strip it down, Zdenek uncovers the principles that allow this 300-ton amphibious craft to hover weightlessly over the ground - and the water. Zdenek explores how the era of mighty passenger hovercrafts was finally brought to a surprising end by cheap alcohol - and then joins the crew of an LCAC, the U.S. Navy's state of the art military hovercraft, deployed in some of the world's most extreme conditions.

Host Chad Zdenek joins a team that's pulling off an engineering first - dismantling the North Sea's biggest oil rig. As the 400-foot-high monster is towed ashore and then dismantled, Zdenek reveals the story of how, against the backdrop of a global oil crisis, deep water oil engineers raced to build an enormous machine to drill through the sea bed in their search for black gold. As he does, he unearths the dozens of systems that kept the rig pumping non-stop during its 40-year lifespan.

Joining a team of mechanics responsible for stripping down and rebuilding the biggest aircraft in the U.S. Air Force's arsenal - the Lockheed C5 Super Transporter - Zdenek discovers what it takes to get 380,000 pounds of plane, plus its cargo, up in the air and back on the ground in combat zones. Inside this mammoth warehouse with wings, Zdenek sees how ingenious engineering overcame the design flaws that once grounded the entire C5 fleet, and the extreme forces that still strain the plane every time it takes flight to allow the Galaxy to play a critical role in conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Go inside one of the biggest inventions of them all - a U.S. aircraft carrier. Zdenek follows the crew of mechanics, engineers and sailors who maintain the USS Carl Vinson, an incredible floating city that's at the forefront of military technology. Embedded on board, he discovers the enormous engineering designed to launch 30-ton aircraft into the sky - and then catch them again as they land at over 100 miles an hour.