pplpod

pplpod
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pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends. Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

  1. 18h ago

    C-17 Globemaster III: The Moose, 823 Kabul Evacuees and a Tampa Mix-Up

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Crews call the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III the Moose because its pressure relief vents groan during refueling. The Air Force wanted a replacement for the aging C-141 Starlifter that could fly oceans like a strategic transport and land on short dirt strips like a tactical one, and McDonnell Douglas won in 1981 with a design descended from the YC-15. The program nearly died: in 1990 Dick Cheney cut the order from 210 to 120, the prototype was overweight and buggy, and in October 1992 a static test wing failed at 128 percent of its design limit load instead of 150 percent. In late 1993 the Pentagon gave the company two years to fix things or stop at 40 planes, and it absorbed a loss of nearly $1.5 billion. Engineers later found the test jacks had loaded the wing incorrectly. The C-17 entered service in 1995, won the Collier Trophy, flew half of the strategic airlift missions over Kosovo and carries the presidential limousine ahead of Air Force One. On one August 2021 flight out of Kabul it carried a record 823 people. In 2024 an Indian Air Force C-17 flew 2,600 kilometers to drop MARCOS commandos and boats beside the hijacked MV Ruen, rescuing 17 sailors and capturing 35 pirates. Boeing closed the Long Beach line in 2015 after 279 aircraft, and as of June 2025 restarting it was under discussion. Four Pratt & Whitney F117 engines from the Boeing 757 family each make over 40,000 pounds of thrust, and upward-venting thrust reversers let the jet back up.Its cargo floor flips from rollers to a flat surface for a 69-ton M1 Abrams, and it can seat 102 paratroopers.Since 1999 C-17s have flown five-hour Operation Deep Freeze runs from New Zealand to McMurdo Station, past a point of safe return.The RAF used a C-17 to carry Queen Elizabeth II's coffin from Edinburgh to London in 2022.A 2010 crash at Elmendorf killed four crew, the only fatal hull loss, and a fatigued crew in 2012 landed at tiny Peter O. Knight Airport instead of MacDill.

  2. 18h ago

    C-130 Hercules: A Hookless Carrier Landing, Entebbe and the Fulton Yoke

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In late October 1963, Lieutenant James H. Flatley III landed a four-engine Lockheed C-130 Hercules on the carrier USS Forrestal with no arresting hook, completing 29 touch-and-goes and 21 full-stop landings and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross. The C-130 came from a 1951 requirement after the Korean War exposed the limits of piston transports like the C-47 and C-119: carry 92 passengers or 64 paratroopers, operate from rough strips and load through a hinged rear ramp. Kelly Johnson reportedly told designer Willis Hawkins that signing the proposal would destroy Lockheed, yet he flew the chase plane when Stanley Beltz and Roy Wimmer took the first YC-130 aloft from Burbank on August 23, 1954. Four Allison T56 turboprops gave it power with a 1,100-nautical-mile range, and automatic feathering kept a dead engine from windmilling. Ski-equipped versions supplied DEW Line radar sites on the Greenland ice cap and Antarctica. In Vietnam C-130s rolled 10,000-pound daisy cutter bombs out the ramp, and in 1969 a CIA C-130 with a crew from Taiwan flew six and a half hours at night to drop sensors at a Chinese nuclear test site. In the 1976 Entebbe raid, Israel flew four C-130s about 2,200 miles at roughly 100 feet, carrying a black Mercedes to fool airport guards. Operation Commando Scarf dropped chemicals on the Ho Chi Minh Trail to turn monsoon rain into impassable mud.Variants include the AC-130 gunship and the EC-130 Commando Solo flying radio and TV station.HC-130s used the Fulton system, snagging a balloon line with a nose yoke to yank a person off the ground.The 910th Airlift Wing sprayed dispersants over the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.As of 2024 the C-130 had 70 years of continuous production, with over 2,700 built for more than 60 nations, and a 2021 Rapid Dragon test dropped cruise missiles on a parachuted pallet.

  3. 18h ago

    A-10 Warthog: The Titanium Bathtub, Kim Campbell and the Retirement Fight

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolt II grew out of Vietnam, where the U.S. lost about 266 propeller-driven A-1 Skyraiders, mostly to small arms fire, while the Mach 2 F-4 Phantom was too fast and costly for close air support. Worried that Army attack helicopters such as the AH-1 Cobra and AH-56 Cheyenne would take the mission and its funding, the Air Force launched the A-X program in 1966. The 1970 requirements called for a 460 mph top speed, a 16,000-pound payload, 4,000-foot dirt runways and a design built around a 30mm rotary cannon. In 1973 Fairchild Republic's YA-10 beat Northrop's YA-9. Fighter pilots initially resisted the slow, radar-less jet, but in the 1991 Gulf War 132 A-10s posted a 95.7 percent mission-capable rate hunting Scud launchers, and Captain Robert Swain shot down an Iraqi helicopter with the gun. Over Baghdad in 2003, Captain Kim Campbell lost all hydraulics and an engine to flak, then flew home for nearly an hour in manual reversion and landed. The record also includes, from 2010 to 2015, involvement in incidents that killed 35 Afghan civilians and 10 U.S. troops in friendly fire. Wing cracks led to Boeing's $1.2 billion wing replacement program, and Congress has repeatedly blocked Air Force efforts to retire the fleet. The GAU-8 Avenger is roughly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, and the nose gear is offset so the firing barrel sits on the centerline.A 1,200-pound titanium tub, half an inch to an inch and a half thick, protects the pilot and flight controls from 23mm fire.Engines mounted high near the tail avoid ingesting debris, and the tail planes shield their heat from ground-based missiles.The A-10C upgrade added glass cockpits, HOTAS controls combining an F-16 stick and F-15 throttle, targeting pods and JDAMs.Twelve A-10s deployed in the 2026 Iran War, and new wings could keep the fleet flying to 2035 or even 2040.

  4. 18h ago

    FIM-92 Stinger: The CIA Buyback, Car Battery Hacks and Obsolete Microchips

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! The FIM-92 Stinger, introduced in 1981, is a shoulder-fired missile in a roughly 35-pound tube that reaches over Mach 2.5 and hits targets up to 15,700 feet away. It replaced the FIM-43 Redeye, which could only chase an aircraft's exhaust after it had already passed overhead. The Stinger's all-aspect seeker sees heat from air friction on the nose and wings, and later POST and RMP variants added a dual infrared and ultraviolet seeker that rejects flares. A small ejection motor kicks the missile clear of the gunner before the main motor fires, a battery coolant unit chills the seeker with pressurized argon, the processor runs on four kilobytes of RAM, and the missile self-destructs after 17 seconds without a hit. After a limited debut with the British SAS in the 1982 Falklands War, the Stinger reached the Afghan mujahideen through the CIA's Operation Cyclone, pushed by Representative Charlie Wilson. The mujahideen claimed a 79 percent kill rate and 269 Soviet aircraft, figures analysts doubt, but Soviet helicopters were forced to fly higher. In 1990 the U.S. began a $55 million buyback, paying about $183,000 per missile, yet hundreds went missing. After 2022 shipments to Ukraine drained about a quarter of the U.S. stockpile, Raytheon told the Pentagon the seeker relied on microelectronics no longer made anywhere and recalled retired engineers to redesign it. The episode reports that the Secret Service does not deny long-standing rumors of Stingers in the presidential motorcade, though the real plan is to drive away.Missing Stingers are tracked to Iran, North Korea and insurgents in Sri Lanka.Battery coolant units expire after four to five years, which should disable old missiles.Insurgents in the Syrian civil war bypassed dead thermal batteries by wiring launchers to ordinary car batteries.The Red Wasp program would add a ramjet to extend range against drones while the Army seeks a replacement by 2026.

  5. 18h ago

    Unilever: Margarine Meets Soap, Dove vs. Axe and the 2026 McCormick Deal

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Unilever was formed in 1930 when Dutch margarine maker Margarine Unie merged with British soapmaker Lever Brothers, two companies that had been bidding against each other for the same palm oil, whale oil and tallow. During the Second World War, profits trapped in the U.S. and U.K. were spent on local businesses such as Thomas J. Lipton tea and Batchelors peas. As margarine sales stagnated and Procter & Gamble's synthetic detergents gained ground, Unilever moved into Sunsilk, Dove and Good Humor, then bought Brooke Bond, Pond's and, in 2000, Ben & Jerry's, SlimFast and Bestfoods, which brought Hellmann's and Knorr. In 2004 it ran Dove's Real Beauty campaign alongside Axe body spray ads aimed at teenage boys. Under CEO Paul Polman it sold its spreads business, including Flora and I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, to KKR in 2017 for nearly 7 billion euros, the same year it fended off a $143 billion takeover bid from Kraft Heinz. A Reuters investigation found Unilever lobbying in India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka against bans on multilayer sachets it produces by the billions each year. It stayed in Russia after 2022, where profits doubled to about 108 million euros, before selling its Russian and Belarusian business to Arnest Group in late 2024. It then spun off the Magnum Ice Cream Company in November 2025, bought Dr. Squatch for $1.5 billion and agreed in March 2026 to combine most of its food arm with McCormick & Company. Unilever paid about $1 billion for Dollar Shave Club and also bought Seventh Generation after the Kraft Heinz bid.The company now works with a network of roughly 300,000 digital creators and influencers instead of top-down TV campaigns.The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority's greenwashing probe of Unilever did not close until late 2024.In 2021 Florida put Unilever on a scrutinized companies list after Ben & Jerry's stopped sales in Israeli-controlled territories.The McCormick deal created a sauces and spices business valued at over $65 billion and gave Unilever a $15.7 billion cash payout.

  6. 18h ago

    Time Warner Cable: Nickelodeon Roots, Data Caps and the Spectrum Rebrand

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Time Warner Cable grew from American Television and Communications, founded in 1968, and Warner Cable, founded in 1973. In 1977 Warner Cable began making its own channels, Pinwheel and Star Channel, which became Nickelodeon and The Movie Channel, and in 1981 it launched MTV. Time Inc. and Warner Communications merged in 1990, and in 1992 their cable units became the Time Warner Cable Group. In 1993 it sold a 25 percent stake to phone company US West to fund fiber optic upgrades, and in 1995 a cable modem pilot in Elmira, New York, first called the Southern Tier Online Community, became Road Runner High Speed Online. In 2006 it joined Comcast to buy bankrupt Adelphia's assets for $17 billion and swapped subscribers to cluster its markets, taking most of Los Angeles and Dallas. Time Warner spun the cable company off in 2009 without super-voting stock. Data cap trials starting in Beaumont, Texas in 2008 drew a group called Stop the Cap and Congressman Eric Massa, and TWC ranked at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index from 2011 to 2014. Comcast's $45.2 billion bid, announced in February 2014, was abandoned in April 2015 as the Justice Department prepared to sue. Charter then agreed to pay $78.7 billion, closed in May 2016, and by 2017 had renamed the service Spectrum. TWC launched DVR service in the Houston area in 2004.Its 2009 TV Everywhere plan let subscribers stream video online only after logging in with an active cable account.On March 16, 2010, a glitch in eastern North Carolina put Playboy TV on two kids on-demand channels for two hours.A combined Comcast and TWC would have controlled an estimated 57 percent of U.S. broadband capacity, with Netflix among the opponents.Charter folded in Bright House Networks alongside TWC and let legacy customers keep their roadrunner.com email addresses.

  7. 18h ago

    Su-57 Felon: Exposed Screws, a Tarmac Drone Strike and a Downed Okhotnik

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Russia's Sukhoi Su-57, called the Felon by NATO, drew mockery at the Zhuhai Air Show in China when visitors photographed ordinary visible screws on its panels. The jet began with the PAK FA program in 1999, when Russia could afford only one fifth-generation fighter to replace aging MiG-29s and Su-27s. Sukhoi beat Mikoyan's single-engine pitch partly because export sales of upgraded Su-27s to China and India had given it the cash. The resulting twin-engine design had to be a true multirole fighter with two tandem internal weapons bays, thrust-vectoring nozzles for moves like Pugachev's Cobra, and stealth focused on the front rather than all aspects, plus side-looking cheek radars that let it keep a lock while beaming. India, which signed a 2007 joint venture for a variant called the FGFA and was to invest about $6 billion, walked away in 2018 over engines, stealth and cost. Early prototypes developed structural cracks, forcing a redesign that pushed normal takeoff weight to nearly 27 tons, and in December 2019 the first serial production jet crashed on a factory test flight; the pilot ejected. Sanctions cut off Western processors and gallium nitride radar modules. In Ukraine the jets mostly fire long-range missiles from Russian airspace, yet one was hit by a Ukrainian drone while parked in June 2024, and in October 2024 an Su-57 pilot shot down an S-70 Okhotnik drone after its data link failed. The episode explains that the screwed-together aircraft shown abroad were early test articles, not finished serial production jets.The Su-57 uses a quadruple redundant digital fly-by-wire system because its airframe is aerodynamically unstable by design.Russian doctrine expects the jet to operate under ground-based air defenses such as the S-400, covering its weak rear aspect.Two prototypes deployed briefly to Syria in 2018, firing cruise missiles in relatively permissive airspace.Algeria is reported to be receiving the first export Su-57s, aiming for operational status around 2026.

  8. 18h ago

    Paris CDG: The 2E Roof Collapse, a Dead Terminal 4 and the 2027 Renumbering

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport began in 1966 as Aéroport de Paris Nord, planned on open farmland 23 kilometers northeast of central Paris so it could grow without the suburban fights that boxed in Orly and Heathrow. It covers 32.38 square kilometers, about a third of the size of Paris, and spans three départements, Seine-et-Marne, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-d'Oise, plus six communes. Terminal 1, designed by Paul Andreu and opened in 1974, is a circular concrete drum linked by tunnels to satellite gates. Terminal 2, opened in 1981 for Air France, grew into seven sub-terminals, 2A through 2G, with 2G far enough away to require a shuttle bus, a layout the episode ties to CDG's lost-luggage reputation. On May 23, 2004, shortly after it opened, part of the elliptical concrete roof of Terminal 2E collapsed near Gate E50 and killed four people; the concrete shell lacked sufficient steel reinforcement, and rebuilding that section cost about 100 million euros. A 9 billion euro Terminal 4 meant to add 30 to 40 million passengers a year was canceled in 2021 as incompatible with France's climate goals. Instead, the CDG Express rail link is due in early 2027, and on March 16, 2027 the terminals will be renumbered in sequence from 1 to 7. About 70 million passengers a year use CDG, and 105 airlines served it in 2025, second only to Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi.Bags connecting between sub-terminals can ride over a kilometer of conveyors and then cross active taxiways on driven carts.Operator Groupe ADP spent 250 million euros refurbishing Terminal 1 during the COVID-19 downtime, with a bistro-style lounge by Maxime Liautard and Hugo Toro.CDG handled over 1.9 million tons of cargo in 2024, second in Europe only to Frankfurt.Under the new scheme, Terminal 3 becomes Terminal 2, 2A and 2C become Terminal 3, 2B and 2D become Terminal 4, 2E becomes 5, 2F becomes 6 and 2G becomes 7.

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1.6
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About

pplpod is a podcast about people, places and lots of other stuff. Each episode takes a deep dive into the lives, choices, and legacies of fascinating figures from history, culture, music, and beyond. From icons who shaped entire generations to hidden stories that deserve the spotlight, pplpod brings you closer to the people behind the headlines and the legends. Thoughtful, engaging, and story-driven, pplpod explores what makes these lives extraordinary—and what we can learn from them today.

Information

  • Creator
    pplpod
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    2K
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © pplpod
  • Show Website
    pplpod

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