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TIL Nathan Fielder, a comedian with no prior flying experience, flew a real Boeing 737 filled with passengers after obtaining only 280 hours of flight time to demonstrate the importance of communication in the cockpit

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via reddit.com

j40X TIL that in 1985 JAL flight 123, a Boeing 747 flying from Tokyo to Osaka, lost its tail mid-flight. During the 32 minute descent and then crash into the mountains, many passengers wrote goodbye notes to their loved ones on airplane drink napkins. Of the 520 passengers on board, 4 survived.
4kb4X TIL the surname Poindexter is most common in the United States but actually originated from the island of Jersey between Britain and France where it survives in its original form of Poingdestre
kO4N5 TIL that the tale of Hansel and Gretel might have originated during the Great Famine of 1315 - 17. Food was in such short supplies that people abandoned their kids (probably why Hansel and Gretel are lost in a forest) and that people even resorted to cannibalism (explains the cannibalistic witch)
X0ROQ TIL that cats can really land on their feet when they fall freely from a tall building's window. This is called righting reflex. But unlike popular belief, cats can even die after falling upright on the ground.
kb5W TIL organ transplant networks have started using a pairing algorithm to find kidney donation pairs and chains for willing but incompatible matches to swap donors resulting in a 50% increase in compatible matches