That Time When UPS Overnight Shipped a Whale in the Mail

this video is made possible by brilliant learn complex topics simply by being one of the first two hundred to sign up at brilliant org slash real-life floor this item right here is a jet twenty six by eighty geared head engine lace I genuinely have no idea what it does but it just so happens to be the heaviest single object that Amazon will ship to you for free it costs thirty five thousand dollars and it literally weighs more than two Toyota Corollas do but that won't stop amazon from delivering it right to your front door for free if you really ever want one it's probably the single stupidest thing that you could drunk order off of Amazon after a long day but it's unbelievably heavy as it would be it's still not anywhere near the heaviest object that has ever been shipped in the mail for free because back in 2005 UBS received a very strange request to priority overnight ship a group of whales and even more strangely if they agreed to do it for free eccentric billionaire possible Bond villain in home depot co-founder Bernard Marcus wanted to see some whales in Atlanta which has the tiny problem of being two hundred and sixty seven miles away from the ocean so he donated two hundred and fifty million dollars of his own money towards the opening of the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta which was set to become the largest aquarium anywhere in the world at its opening and as the centerpiece of the entire facility the aquarium designed the world's largest tank to house their primary stars a group of giant whale sharks which would make them the only aquarium outside of Asia to have them there were only a few minor problems with this ambition though a whale sharks are big like really big fee they're also alive you know and probably won't enjoy being picked up and put in a box like they're an Alexa let alone be put on an airplane and overnighted and see the whale sharks that they bought were located on basically the other side of the planet in Taiwan over eight thousand miles away from Atlanta now the aquarium did have a certain favour that they could call upon to help them out while the home depot guy made by far the most generous contribution to the aquarium local atlanta-based ups wanted to pitch in as well it offered them free shipping for anything that they might need to help get started but by saying free shipping on anything the aquarium took that to mean literally anything and so they called them ups to help them out with their little project of shipping live whales from one side of the planet over to the other now I know that whale sharks aren't technically whales they're sharks that are as big as whales hence the name but they're still friggin huge the two whale sharks that ups were tasked with shipping were kids but they were still 16 feet long and weighed up to 2,000 pounds each and when they're fully grown they're more like 33 feet long and weighed 20,000 pounds way heavier than an African elephant is they're truly gigantic animals and they're also harder to transport than an elephant because if you transport them without being in water they die water is super super heavy and it's just an additional component the ups had a factor in with their calculations here nobody had ever shipped a marine animal this big before in an airplane so nobody really had any idea of what they were doing it all in the beginning the aquarium had purchased the whale sharks out of Taiwan's annual fishing kill quota so yeah if the aquarium had an ax bottom they would have been eaten the whale sharks were being held in an ocean pen on the coast near a small Regional Airport in the south of Taiwan and when the UPS logistics team showed up to survey it they realized that the runway nearby just wasn't gonna work it was too weak to support the weight of a 747 loaded with a couple of big fish so here's what they did instead they began by using some cranes with a sling to capture the two whale sharks out of their pen and place them in to individual custom-made shipping containers the containers were 24 feet long by 8 feet wide and filled with a 2,000 pound whale shark plus water and life-support systems which made the total weight of each container approximately 25,000 pounds the two tanks were then loaded onto a turboprop Lockheed c-130 and flown up to the International Airport at Taipei for the transfer aboard the bigger 747 as the c-130 pulled up to the gate adjacent to the 747 the 747 was already fueled up and ready for takeoff but they had to figure out where to place the big tanks inside of it after multiple calculations the UPS logistics team decided upon a method of bringing one tank into the planes nose the second tank into the back and then simultaneously slowly moved the two tanks together towards the plains natural point of balance over the main landing gear before bolting them both down to the floor the crew were instructed to take off and land slow and shallow so as not to stress out their special passengers too greatly but by this point time was the biggest enemy of the operation they couldn't afford any delays with the whale sharks because they were constantly pooping and pissing inside of their small tanks and fouling up their limited water its nulli you can replace 20,000 plus pounds of water when you're flying in a jet up in the air even a short delay could have resulted in one of their deaths and the journey from Taipei to Atlanta was over 17 hours long so ups brought aboard an entire team of skilled veterinarians carpenters and marine biologists to ensure that the trip went smoothly the 747 took off from Taipei and had to land in Anchorage first for a fish and wildlife inspection because you know you can't just fly a whale from one side of the world to the other without the proper paperwork they had a crew change and continued on from there to Atlanta safely where the whale shark containers were unloaded placed onto flatbed trucks and driven from the airport to their new home in the aquarium all alive and in one piece ups achieved something that nobody had ever done before the madmen actually shipped live gigantic whales in a plane from one side of the world to the other and all overnight and it only took six weeks of planning and came with a shipping cost of 1.4 million dollars not all that bad of a price at all when you consider the ups did all of it for the aquarium for free of course if you want to figure out a way to ship your own gigantic marine animal to your house you'll not only need a pretty big tank that's probably gonna have to be bigger than your entire houses but you'll also need a solid understanding of multiple mathematical concepts for your logistics calculations and there's no better place to start learning exactly that then on brilliant math is of course a pretty daunting subject that I have personally struggled with my entire life and unfortunately a lot of places and websites will just teach you individual mathematical concepts without teaching you the principles that link them all together brilliant however is truly different they focus on those fund by teaching them in an approachable intuitive way that really helps you understand how to use what you end up learning later on so you can start with a beginner course like mathematical fundamentals and easily move on from there to more advanced courses like algebra geometry calculus and even beyond but brilliant interactive mathematics courses are just some of their many fantastic courses so if you want to learn complex topics easily it's totally worth checking them out to learn more about brilliant go to brilliant org slash real life lore and sign up for free but then the first 200 people that go to that link will also get 20% off of their annual premium subscription and as always thank you for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 1,183,308

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, ups, ups whale shark transport, overnight shipping, whale in the mail, whale shipment, whale transport, whale transport plane

Id: A2Kkj0dvZtw

Length: 7min 20sec (440 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019