Hello and welcome to Hack Hacks, the podcast where we celebrate the cleverest projects in the maker world. Today, we’re talking about how one engineer actually weighed an airplane as it flew overhead. That’s right—[AlphaPhoenix] “weighed an airplane,” and even a paper airplane, using a do-it-yourself scale made of foamcore and four load cells hooked up to an Arduino and a laptop for visualization.

After a quick test with a toy car, our builder sent a paper plane gliding over the scale. The result? A clear demonstration that “any weight from a flying object is eventually transferred to the ground via the air.” But the fun didn’t stop there. Next, they built a smaller device—a pressure sensor in an airtight box, basically a fancy barometer—and stationed it beneath real airliners at a local airport for three days.

They “took measurements, made assumptions, and arrived at figures,” even though those results were “off by more than one order of magnitude.” Still, it’s an unbelievably cool experiment that shows just how creative hacking can be. Thanks for listening, and keep on making!
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