This video was made possible by Brilliant. Learn something new every day for 20% by being
one of the first 200 people to sign up at brilliant.org/hai. I’ve got a question for you: what’s the
difference between an airplane and a truck? Well, stuff 1,088 people in the back of the
plane and you’re saving the world, but get pulled over with 1,088 people in the back
of your truck and suddenly everyone makes a big commotion. Ok, maybe that was a bad joke, but you know
what’s also bad: the persecution of Ethiopian Jews. Let me explain. Our story begins in 1991. Neon crop tops were in, Nirvana was all over
MTV, the Terminator had just made good on his promise to be back, and the Ethiopian
government, led by this guy, Mengistu Haile Mariam, was on the verge of falling as the
result of a long-running civil war with Eritrean and Tigrean rebels. Now, the Mariam government was already bad—like,
very, very, responsible for famine the caused the deaths of up to 2,000,000 Ethiopians bad—and
the toppling of his government was expected to lead to massive instability that would
also be bad, and the point is, things in Ethiopia were… like…. really bad… and getting worse. All of which is why the people of Israel—which
is a nation somewhere in this area that I won’t zoom into because there’s no way
to show its borders and not make some people mad—started to get very worried about the
well-being of Ethiopia’s sizable Jewish population. Therefore, Israel began to secretly make plans
to get the Ethiopian Jews out of Ethiopia and get them to Israel… using airplanes. See where I’m going here? The record for most people on a plane is going
to be set when they evacuate the Ethiopian Jews. Did you not get that? Come on, this is basic foreshadowing. Now that plan may sound a bit odd, but it
had actually been done before—Operation Moses in 1984 and Operation Joshua in 1985
had both airlifted Ethiopian Jews to Israel, but the airlifts had been forced to stop in
1986, for complicated international relations-y reasons. This new secret operation, intended to pick
up nearly all the remaining Ethiopian Jews, was called Operation Solomon, after Solomon
Grundy, the evil zombie who fights against Batman, or maybe it was named after King Solomon;
hard to say. But getting 14,500 people from rural Ethiopia
to Israel wouldn’t be easy, and it required a lot of preparation—after all, Israel is
here, and the Ethiopian Jews lived here, in the Gondar region, and the nearest airport
was here, in Addis Ababa, and all those places are pretty far apart. Plus, the nearest Taco Bell was here, so they
wouldn’t be able to have any Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Taco Supremes on their journey. And so, for two years, starting in 1989, members
of the Ethiopian Jews traveled the approximately 400 miles or 650 kilometers from the Gondar
Region to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia where the airport was located, mainly using
buses and trucks procured by the AAEJ—the American Association for Ethiopian Jews—but
also occasionally using horses or their own two feet. Finally, by mid-1991, nearly all the Ethiopian
Jews had arrived in Addis Ababa, which meant it was time to leave—but leaving wouldn’t
be easy either; after all, you can’t exactly fly 14,500 people out of a commercial airport
without anyone noticing, because, if you’ll remember, airports used to be places that
people went to. To do it, the Israelis would need approval
from the Ethiopian government, which required help from the Kentucky-Fried Country itself,
the United States. For a while, the Ethiopian President had been
trying to trade the departure of the Ethiopian Jews for help from the US, and the US was
maybe going to give it to him, but then in May of 1991, the Ethiopian President fled
the nation in exile—because of all the war and killing people stuff—and President George
HW Bush wrote a letter to the new Ethiopian leaders, which got them approval to leave. And so, on May 24, 1991, the Ethiopian
Jews began an extraordinary exodus. All 14,500 travelers gathered at the Israeli
embassy in Addis Ababa, and were transported to the airport on special buses, escorted
by Israeli soldiers of Ethiopian descent. Using 35 planes—a combination of Israeli
Air Force C-130s and El Al Boeing 747s—14,500 people made the 1,500 mile journey from Addis
Ababa to Israel in under 36 hours, the fastest mass departure until audiences walked out
of Rise of Skywalker. There were a total of 40 flights, and among
them was an El Al Boeing 747, which set, and still holds, the Guinness World Record for
the most passengers on a single plane ever. The total number is most commonly cited as
1,088, but it may have been as few as 1,078 and as high as 1,122, including two babies
who were born over the course of the flight, but the dispute ultimately doesn’t matter—anywhere
in the range of consensus would still be the record. Interestingly, these 1088-ish actually had
the option to fly the trip on United Airlines, but they decided this would be more comfortable…
maybe. Now, normally, a Boeing 747 would carry about
366 passengers, but the additional 700-ish could fit because the passengers were crammed
together really really tightly, were malnourished because of the aforementioned famine, and
because the entire plane has been stripped of all its seats and Skymall magazines. Ultimately, all 14,500 landed in Tel Aviv,
where an enormous celebration broke out, because, you know, they did the thing—and when you
do the thing, you gotta celebrate. As an interesting side note, this all happened
on the Sabbath, which would normally bar observant Jews from traveling—but luckily, there’s
an exception for when the action would save a life; or in this case, 14,500 lives. If you wanted to understand the physics
and math behind how many people you can fit onto an airplane so that it can still fly,
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