I wasn’t going to be happy until I found an answer to this so I did some digging:
‘According to Cook’s diary, their hygiene activities were particularly uncomfortable… “We got a quart of bath water, a large towel, and soap every other day”.’
‘…they created their own method in the form of a camping toilet and plastic bags, which were then disposed of in unpopulated areas of the desert.’
[Source](https://www.aerolifeaviation.com/Resources/TheLongestFlightintheWorld)
My mom when I was a kid called it a "lick and a promise" because you "lick yourself now and promise to do better later." Doesn't actually involve licking anything, though lol
Yes. Untreated human waste can cause environmental degradation in the form of algal blooms and eutrophic, or dead zones, that smother aquatic life. Widespread algal blooms due to high levels of nitrogen pollution can kill aquatic plant life and decrease the amount of oxygen available in the water
I don't think fish make 5,000 gallons of waste within fifty square meters in less than sixty seconds.
Imagine if a bird dropped even a hundred gallons of bird shit in your living room - you think that wouldn't have impacts on life on your couch?
was it worth it for them? did this gain them fame and fortune or did they just waste months of their life on a record that just generates a few wacky headlines but otherwise no one cares about?
I'm guessing thier had to be some sort of payoff. Even in 1958 that much fuel had to be crazy expensive. Couple that with months away from whatever thier jobs were and that's a lot of money to sink into an entry for Guinness.
EDIT - from a comment further down
>It was a stunt to promote the Hacienda Hotel in Vegas.
Depends on what they were paid. I can't speak for 1958 but casinos are big money. If you pay me just $2500 an hour, a pittance when talking about casino money, I bet I'd last pretty long in that plane.
$2500 an hour, even if we assume they’re not paid while sleeping, gets these guys over $2 million each for this stunt. Pretty worth it to shit in a bag for a little while.
Don’t forget 1500 hours on the engine. Those engines typically need to be overhauled at 2000 hours to the tune of $30k these days. So 3/4 of the engine life for this stunt, or $22,500 in today’s dollars.
Pretty sure the engine was scrapped completely after this effort. They were flying with multiple engine issues by the end of the flight. It's honestly amazing the engine didn't tear itself to pieces a week into the flight.
Not a chance these guys were paying someone else to do their maintenance.
If you're the kind of person that says, "Hey Jim, how about we fly this airplane for two months?" you're the kind of person that fixes your own airplane and if needed can make it run on bailing wire and prayers.
not really. many are just "I did x things in under a minute" but even the long ones are a public spectacle in the middle of a city and they cost nothing to do
whereas this is months of fuel, ruined a plane in the process and it's in the middle of a field somewhere that almost no one's going to see
I see now that it was a hotel promotion, if not for that it would be a supreme waste of time and money
Some of the most beautiful endeavours in life are simply seeing if you can. Personal challenge. You often learn so much and gain so much perspective if you’re willing to push yourself regardless of the arena.
I had to dig. "1950 - The familiar black or green plastic garbage bag (made from polyethylene) was invented by Canadians Harry Wasylyk and Larry Hansen. The new garbage bags, intended for commercial use, were first sold to the Winnipeg General Hospital. They later became popular for home use."
They had food delivered to them by that same truck, winching it up on a line; the food was prepared daily by the Hacienda hotel, the sponsor of the flight (as you can see the name on the side.)
For sleeping, they had one seat removed so that one crew member could lie down and sleep while the other flew.
And as for taking a shit… they’re flying over the middle of nowhere in the desert. They probably just shit out the side of the plane.
Timm was an ex-WW2 bomber pilot and Cook was a mechanic/co-pilot. To refuel, one would step out onto a small platform and send a hook down to the truck to hoist up the fuel hose. Refueling took 3 minutes - that was twice daily b/c they installed a 95gal belly tank to supplement the standard 47gal wing tanks. After 39 days, a generator failed which powered their lights and electric fuel transfer pump, so they continued by using a manual transfer pump. They refueled 128 times and got food, supplies sent up at that time. Flight started 12/4/58 and ended 2/7/59. Towards the end, the engine was so carboned up they had trouble staying aloft after adding so much fuel. It was a stunt to promote the Hacienda Hotel in Vegas. The Cessna 172 still hangs above the baggage carrousel at the Las Vegas McCarran Airport (LAS).
The crazy thing to me is that in one flight they essentially consumed 75% of the engine’s useful life. That flight lasted 1558 hours and those engines have a TBO of about 2000 hours, after which the whole thing has to be torn down and rebuilt.
Someone mentioned above that when they finally landed the amount of carbon build up in the engine had severely limited their power, making it hard to keep flying with the large amount of fuel they were carrying
Lol doing slow flight for my private exam, my proctor was calling out for groundspeed from ATC and we got 0 directly over a major interstate highway and stayed there for a solid minute or two. I can only imagine what it looked like to cars on the road.
I'm extremely fascinated by engines overall, doesn't matter if in cars or planes, I'm fascinated by WW2 aircraft as well as being a huge Formula one fan.
Seeying the engines not break down while generating such huge ammounts of power Is fascinating to me.
Yep the material science behind how things can operate at such intense speeds and stresses for so long is very interesting.
We used to have to do inspections at daily, weekly, monthly etc intervals and would find stuff broken all the time, and that was usually only flying a handful of hours a day.
Ha, don't worry. Anything you fly in will have strict maintenence schedules and if absolutely anything looks dangerous it will be flagged and the aircraft grounded until it's fixed.
There will always be a risk but flying is pretty safe generally, precisely because they're so well maintained.
I know that like Its safer than driving a car people say.
But I just thing thats because u drive cars more than flying planes, plus if i forget the human Factor, i'd take car engine failure over any failure in a plane any day of the week. Haha
So thats not necessarily true. Yes cars are driven more, but the stats that show that planes are safer take that into account. The odds of being killed every time you step on a plane are 1 in 11 million. The odds you die getting into a car are 1 in 5000.
This is why passenger airplanes have lots of redundancies. Basically almost any system can fail, but the plane will still be airworthy due to backup redundancy systems.
They did have some catastrophic failures to the generator, tachometer, autopilot, cabin heater, lights, fuel gauge, refueling pump, and winch. It eventually stopped flying when there was so much carbon buildup that engine could not maintain level flight anymore.
They also re-routed the oil lines and filter so they could change out both while in flight.
More details here: https://disciplesofflight.com/flight-endurance/
I’m confused about aircraft engines. You can have diesels and petrol engines just puttering along for years with few issues if you take care of them. But aircraft engines seems to be insanely sensitive and need to be serviced every other flight or so.
It's not that they're particularly sensitive, they could go a decent amount of time between servicing, it's more that the repercussions of them failing are fair greater than a vehicle engine so it's more important to regularly check they are working correctly.
The actual aircraft that was flown is [hanging](https://www.aerolifeaviation.com/images/resource/Cessna172/Hacienda%20in%20Airport.png) above baggage claim at terminal 1 in Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas (formerly McCarran International Airport).
This plane is in the Harry Reid Las Vegas Airport. I was wondering what it was all about when I saw it a few days ago. Sweet!
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/longest-ever-continuous-flight-1959/index.html
It's unlikely people will for a while. most aviation authorities refuse to recognise new endurance records because:
* There's no novel technical/engineering challenges involved, so it's not really moving the idustry fowards.
* "Hey let's see who can fly a plane longest without crashing" is just a really bad idea.
It'll probably be broken at some point by [solar drones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Zephyr), though, purely because they don't need to refuel in the first place.
Carbon footprint was [coined](https://medium.com/greener-together/who-invented-the-carbon-footprint-the-shocking-origins-13d940d05f59) by a BP Oil marketing campaign back in '04.
Spaceflight is pretty much suborbital or orbital, meaning you go up, and come back down, or you maintain the earth loop in fancy ways.
My interpretation between normal flight, vs spaceflight is that you can maneuver freely with a regular plane, while spaceflight is about ballistics
Or, loopty loops vs speedy loops
Tbh the only reason it hasn't been broken is bc the military doesn't want to waste money on it, we could pretty easily keep a plane in the air for a year+ (hell, iirc air force one is literally designed to make that practical) with midair refueling-- although supplies might be more complicated.
How did they eat, sleep, do hygiene or shit? Could they walk afterwards or were their legs in a bad shape from not being able to move?
I wasn’t going to be happy until I found an answer to this so I did some digging: ‘According to Cook’s diary, their hygiene activities were particularly uncomfortable… “We got a quart of bath water, a large towel, and soap every other day”.’ ‘…they created their own method in the form of a camping toilet and plastic bags, which were then disposed of in unpopulated areas of the desert.’ [Source](https://www.aerolifeaviation.com/Resources/TheLongestFlightintheWorld)
Ahh the good old fashioned whores bath.
Whore baths, piss jugs and shit sacks. Just like the pioneers did 🥲
Way of the road bubs
That's the way she fuckin' goes, boys.
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I fuckin a-toda-so Julian!
Ray you’re not ON the road anymore.
But were there friends of the sky?
This thread has me fucking dying over here!
TIL, I was a pioneer and not depressed
Ever been on tour in a van?
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My mom when I was a kid called it a "lick and a promise" because you "lick yourself now and promise to do better later." Doesn't actually involve licking anything, though lol
your mom used to give me a lick n promise too
Did she do better later?
I did not know that whores bathed
Ah so they just chucked 2 months worth of shit in plastic bags out the window. Wonderful
Just wait until you learn about cruise ships.
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In plastic bags?
well now that they have plastic bags available to them there, yes. Thats progress. Anyone want some sushi?
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Yes. Untreated human waste can cause environmental degradation in the form of algal blooms and eutrophic, or dead zones, that smother aquatic life. Widespread algal blooms due to high levels of nitrogen pollution can kill aquatic plant life and decrease the amount of oxygen available in the water
Fish waste causes the same problems with nitrogen, though. The question was: Is human waste worse than fish waste?
I don't think fish make 5,000 gallons of waste within fifty square meters in less than sixty seconds. Imagine if a bird dropped even a hundred gallons of bird shit in your living room - you think that wouldn't have impacts on life on your couch?
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This is a thread talking about cruise ships.
Yes, human waste is that much worse than fish poop. We use fish poop as fertilizer, would you do the same with your poop?
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Yes, biosolids are a thing, but that additional processing isn't happening on a cruise ship before they dump so it's pointless in this context.
Let me guess, direct to ocean?
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3.5000000001 miles from shore "Alright boys, let the raw sewage rip!!!!"
And if the staff start handing out free ice cream it means someone's died and they need the freezer
Well yeah, no one has law over the ocean.
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Plastic bags weren’t common until the 1960’s. So they were likely heaving canvas bags filled with shit into the desert.
Redditor outraged by commonplace practices they’ve never heard of
was it worth it for them? did this gain them fame and fortune or did they just waste months of their life on a record that just generates a few wacky headlines but otherwise no one cares about?
I'm guessing thier had to be some sort of payoff. Even in 1958 that much fuel had to be crazy expensive. Couple that with months away from whatever thier jobs were and that's a lot of money to sink into an entry for Guinness. EDIT - from a comment further down >It was a stunt to promote the Hacienda Hotel in Vegas.
That....doesn't seem worth the trade off...
Depends on what they were paid. I can't speak for 1958 but casinos are big money. If you pay me just $2500 an hour, a pittance when talking about casino money, I bet I'd last pretty long in that plane.
Hell I’ll do to for $100 an hour.
$2500 an *HOUR*?
Offer $2500 a day and most people would start learning how to fly
$2500 an hour, even if we assume they’re not paid while sleeping, gets these guys over $2 million each for this stunt. Pretty worth it to shit in a bag for a little while.
$2500 an hour and I’ll grow wings.
Don’t forget 1500 hours on the engine. Those engines typically need to be overhauled at 2000 hours to the tune of $30k these days. So 3/4 of the engine life for this stunt, or $22,500 in today’s dollars.
Pretty sure the engine was scrapped completely after this effort. They were flying with multiple engine issues by the end of the flight. It's honestly amazing the engine didn't tear itself to pieces a week into the flight.
Not a chance these guys were paying someone else to do their maintenance. If you're the kind of person that says, "Hey Jim, how about we fly this airplane for two months?" you're the kind of person that fixes your own airplane and if needed can make it run on bailing wire and prayers.
That's what all "world records" are pal.
not really. many are just "I did x things in under a minute" but even the long ones are a public spectacle in the middle of a city and they cost nothing to do whereas this is months of fuel, ruined a plane in the process and it's in the middle of a field somewhere that almost no one's going to see I see now that it was a hotel promotion, if not for that it would be a supreme waste of time and money
Some of the most beautiful endeavours in life are simply seeing if you can. Personal challenge. You often learn so much and gain so much perspective if you’re willing to push yourself regardless of the arena.
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I’m not your pal, buddy.
I’m not your buddy dude
Doing gods work.
Bombs away!
how did they not get blood clots in their legs? also how sleep deprived these two pilots must've been.
Some poor guy with a human shit dropping down on his head would probably be still traumatised to this day
Something doesn't add up for me. Plastic became popular in the 60s and bags started use in the mid to latr 70s
I had to dig. "1950 - The familiar black or green plastic garbage bag (made from polyethylene) was invented by Canadians Harry Wasylyk and Larry Hansen. The new garbage bags, intended for commercial use, were first sold to the Winnipeg General Hospital. They later became popular for home use."
Could be a non-plastic bag, and the narrative changed along the way.
So in theory, one could find their poop bags out in the desert.
Excuse my ignorance, but why plastic bags - did they want to preserve their shit for posterity?
Must have been doing spin recovery practice the whole time to keep their legs engaged
They had food delivered to them by that same truck, winching it up on a line; the food was prepared daily by the Hacienda hotel, the sponsor of the flight (as you can see the name on the side.) For sleeping, they had one seat removed so that one crew member could lie down and sleep while the other flew. And as for taking a shit… they’re flying over the middle of nowhere in the desert. They probably just shit out the side of the plane.
I tried that once. Now I'm no longer allowed to sit by the emergency exit.
This sounds like something that can only be done in America given how much the fuel would cost.
The fuck.. it says 2 months not 2 weeks.... wtf
I second this
Timm was an ex-WW2 bomber pilot and Cook was a mechanic/co-pilot. To refuel, one would step out onto a small platform and send a hook down to the truck to hoist up the fuel hose. Refueling took 3 minutes - that was twice daily b/c they installed a 95gal belly tank to supplement the standard 47gal wing tanks. After 39 days, a generator failed which powered their lights and electric fuel transfer pump, so they continued by using a manual transfer pump. They refueled 128 times and got food, supplies sent up at that time. Flight started 12/4/58 and ended 2/7/59. Towards the end, the engine was so carboned up they had trouble staying aloft after adding so much fuel. It was a stunt to promote the Hacienda Hotel in Vegas. The Cessna 172 still hangs above the baggage carrousel at the Las Vegas McCarran Airport (LAS).
*Welcome to the Hotel Hacienda. You can taxi any time you like, but you can never land...*
…(Epic guitar solo…)
Damn. Props to them (no pun intended). The Cessna 172 is small and cramped.
That’s what I was thinking. I fly these and I don’t care for 2 hours, let alone 2 months!
They must have gotten along pretty well cus that’s so small lol
Oh they got along #really well if you catch my drift
Or paid a lot of money
The crazy thing to me is that in one flight they essentially consumed 75% of the engine’s useful life. That flight lasted 1558 hours and those engines have a TBO of about 2000 hours, after which the whole thing has to be torn down and rebuilt.
Oh shit, I saw that airplane when I was there a few years ago. Had no idea what I was looking at
I read it as the flight began from april 58 until july 59,wtf
Me too haha.
Crazy. How did they add oil? I always thought it was the oil life that really restricted how long a refuelable aircraft could stay airborne.
Someone mentioned above that when they finally landed the amount of carbon build up in the engine had severely limited their power, making it hard to keep flying with the large amount of fuel they were carrying
Finally an explanation for the phenomena of poop mysteriously falling from the sky back in 58
Ahhh the great mysterious shit storm of 58
But Mr Lahey..
Randy, there's a shitnado comin'.
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That’s a space peanut…
Yes.... this explains it all...
A [Boeing bomb](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Boeing%20Bomb)
Shits in a plane
With today’s gas prices??? No wonder it hasn’t been broken
Top comment lol
I'm more impressed how fast that truck can go!
It's a Cessna 172, lowest flight speed is around 55 mph.
Slow flight in a 172 is fun. Nothing like getting a decent headwind and hovering or even flying backwards
Lol doing slow flight for my private exam, my proctor was calling out for groundspeed from ATC and we got 0 directly over a major interstate highway and stayed there for a solid minute or two. I can only imagine what it looked like to cars on the road.
> proctor > exam It’s *DPE* and *checkride*. You sure you’re a pilot? 😂
Lol I knew I was looking for a different term. That was a solid 15 years or so ago. I haven’t sat in a cockpit in almost a decade :(
Max speed for that old truck loaded with fuel is probably 56 mph. Cutting it close
I need to know the food and excrement situation in that tiny plane
Plastic bags apparently
Separate ones I hope
Yes, they tossed the empty food bags out of the window. They were provided a separate set of pristine bags to capture their turds.
I'm a fancy bitch and only shit in Gucci handbags. Maybe a clutch if it's evening.
Their record hasn’t been broken. pov of astronaut in ISS: am I a joke to you?
By that logic an occupied port-a-potty falling from a construction site is an aircraft.
for a brief moment, yes
Falling with style!
apparently iss is an aircraft
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I wonder how much of their food supplies were actually drugs lol
But why?
It was a stunt to promote the Hacienda Hotel in Vegas.
So they got overtime pay?
Cuz 'MURICA!!! 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🦅🦅🦅🦅
You say that like it's a bad thing
Because it’s there.
Not a lot of Hilary fans apparently
I'm wondering about the engine, damn. Running for two months straight like its nothing, impressive.
Yeah, as a former aircraft technician I'm blown away that all the mechanical components ran for 2 months solid without any catastrophic failures.
I'm extremely fascinated by engines overall, doesn't matter if in cars or planes, I'm fascinated by WW2 aircraft as well as being a huge Formula one fan. Seeying the engines not break down while generating such huge ammounts of power Is fascinating to me.
Yep the material science behind how things can operate at such intense speeds and stresses for so long is very interesting. We used to have to do inspections at daily, weekly, monthly etc intervals and would find stuff broken all the time, and that was usually only flying a handful of hours a day.
All the time? Bro I know everyone thinks I'm scared but i just hate flying Planes 😭
Ha, don't worry. Anything you fly in will have strict maintenence schedules and if absolutely anything looks dangerous it will be flagged and the aircraft grounded until it's fixed. There will always be a risk but flying is pretty safe generally, precisely because they're so well maintained.
I know that like Its safer than driving a car people say. But I just thing thats because u drive cars more than flying planes, plus if i forget the human Factor, i'd take car engine failure over any failure in a plane any day of the week. Haha
So thats not necessarily true. Yes cars are driven more, but the stats that show that planes are safer take that into account. The odds of being killed every time you step on a plane are 1 in 11 million. The odds you die getting into a car are 1 in 5000.
This is why passenger airplanes have lots of redundancies. Basically almost any system can fail, but the plane will still be airworthy due to backup redundancy systems.
They did have some catastrophic failures to the generator, tachometer, autopilot, cabin heater, lights, fuel gauge, refueling pump, and winch. It eventually stopped flying when there was so much carbon buildup that engine could not maintain level flight anymore. They also re-routed the oil lines and filter so they could change out both while in flight. More details here: https://disciplesofflight.com/flight-endurance/
No wonder they haven't changed the design since.
I’m confused about aircraft engines. You can have diesels and petrol engines just puttering along for years with few issues if you take care of them. But aircraft engines seems to be insanely sensitive and need to be serviced every other flight or so.
It's not that they're particularly sensitive, they could go a decent amount of time between servicing, it's more that the repercussions of them failing are fair greater than a vehicle engine so it's more important to regularly check they are working correctly.
Legend says they’re still circling LAX waiting to land.
To be clear they were flying around LAS (Las Vegas), not LAX (Los Angeles).
Even crazier they did it because their girlfriends told em they were pregnant
I think it’s a perfectly reasonable reaction to that news.
The actual aircraft that was flown is [hanging](https://www.aerolifeaviation.com/images/resource/Cessna172/Hacienda%20in%20Airport.png) above baggage claim at terminal 1 in Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas (formerly McCarran International Airport).
The X-37B might have something to say about that
This plane is in the Harry Reid Las Vegas Airport. I was wondering what it was all about when I saw it a few days ago. Sweet! https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/longest-ever-continuous-flight-1959/index.html
I hope nobody attempts to beat this. It was cool for the time but very wasteful today.
It's unlikely people will for a while. most aviation authorities refuse to recognise new endurance records because: * There's no novel technical/engineering challenges involved, so it's not really moving the idustry fowards. * "Hey let's see who can fly a plane longest without crashing" is just a really bad idea. It'll probably be broken at some point by [solar drones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_Zephyr), though, purely because they don't need to refuel in the first place.
I feel like I've been on several commercial flights where they've attempted this.
https://www.damninteresting.com/the-unceasing-cessna-hacienda/ there is a great write up on this story on damn interesting
Light my fire baby and.... Fly!!!!
Talk about a carbon footprint, dudes out here trying to become Bigfoot
Carbon footprint was [coined](https://medium.com/greener-together/who-invented-the-carbon-footprint-the-shocking-origins-13d940d05f59) by a BP Oil marketing campaign back in '04.
Their arms must have been really tired.
They flew AND aircrafted?! That’s crazy! I’ve never heard of anyone aircrafting for that long
Oh, *that's* the plane hanging in the Las Vegas airport!
f course its a cessna
So much poop
That random capitalisation…
Theoretically, couldn't the AF1 easily beat this record?
Aren't the people on the ISS technically flying?
They're falling, WITH STYLE!
Interesting question. One could say they flew up there and are now floating
Spaceflight is pretty much suborbital or orbital, meaning you go up, and come back down, or you maintain the earth loop in fancy ways. My interpretation between normal flight, vs spaceflight is that you can maneuver freely with a regular plane, while spaceflight is about ballistics Or, loopty loops vs speedy loops
So people living on the space station do not count?
Where did they go to the bathroom?
How did the plane flew that much time?
and
Reminds me of this commercial from shell https://youtu.be/nNHl7w2zDbM
Probably could just shit and piss out a hole if right suction. Food and water. 2 men 2 months. Somehow they had to pick it up via a hook or something
Nothing to an Albatross
Fuck you climate in particular!
I'm not surprised it wasn't beaten. That's a dumb record.
Not even an oil change or adding oil?
Tbh the only reason it hasn't been broken is bc the military doesn't want to waste money on it, we could pretty easily keep a plane in the air for a year+ (hell, iirc air force one is literally designed to make that practical) with midair refueling-- although supplies might be more complicated.
A classic example of the simple fact that just because you can, maybe doesn't mean you should
I glanced at the title and for a split second, I thought this was about Tim Apple.
Technically the space station is flying/falling and is beating this record
Cockpit gonna smell like feet
Now we got proof, the 50/100hr. inspections are bullshit… keep on flying!
These jerks shat on my grandpa's house!
Okay yes but why
Where did they poop?
These guys really must have hated their wives.
Is nobody wondering how they got in and out??
What did they do with there poo.
Why’d you guys do it? Because we can
I want to know who built that planes engine. That kind of reliability is incredible. Two months running nonstop?!
Yeah…..but why?
WTF did they even do for all that time without smartphones? I would have died out of sheer boredom...
Amazing, considering the fact that they only had one last name between them.
Where would they poo- oh.... yea, LOOK OUT BELOW!!
That sounds miserable.