Up, up and away episode artwork

EPISODE · Jul 24, 2026 · 1H 5M

Up, up and away

from Not by the Playbook · host BBC World Service

Australia's Emma McDonald is an acrobatic pilot for team "BeyondGravity", racing her plane at high speeds and low altitudes, weaving her way through a course set out in the sky competing in the Air Race X championship. Needing a remarkable mix of strength and agility, and a super focused mindset, those like Emma who succeed at this high octane sport are a rare breed. So how does anyone develop a career in acrobatic aviation? Emma has been revealing all the secrets.Dutchman Bob Van De Burgt loves windsurfing, but it's a demanding physical activity that needs more than a little help from mother nature. It's why races tend to be short, sharp and exciting. Bob excels in all of that, but what he really loves is endurance windsurfing. And it turns out he's pretty good at that too. A few weeks ago he took to a lake near his home in the Netherlands and didn't get off his board again for a full twenty four hours! In that time he broke all sorts of world records and raised money for charity along the way : We send ten billion of them every day! Emoji's have become a very common way of communicating because sometimes words just aren't enough and an emoji can says it all! When elite climber Sasha DiGiulian told us on a previous show that the climbing emoji was based on her, we wanted to know a little bit more. Turns out we live in a world with an official "chief emoji officer" so we tracked them down. Welcome to the wonderful world of emojis with former "Chief Emoji Officer" Jeremy Burge. Smiley face emoji To celebrate his 90th birthday this year, Shaul Ladany went out for a walk near his home close to the city of Beer Sheva in southern Israel . A pretty LONG walk. 5 kilometres in fact. Not bad for a man of his age, but nothing compared to his heyday as a long-distance race-walker who set world records that stand to this day! But, even more remarkably, he survived a childhood in the Belsen concentration camp and then the terrorist attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.(Photo: Matt Hall (top) and Emma McDonald of the Red Bull aerobatic team perform during the Australian International Airshow Aerospace and Defence Expo at Avalon Airport in Geelong, 3 March, 2023. Credit: Paul Crock/AFP)

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