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.