After about a week, a beard starts to take hold in earnest. That’s irrespective of facial hair coverage or quality—whatever a man has, after seven days it is definitely a beard. Sometimes it’s an outgrowth of a vacation, other times it’s because you're a week into what will ultimately be over two months in the air.

How do we know this? Because some madman spent nearly 65 days in a Cessna. Except it wasn’t just one madman—it was two.

The year was 1959. Las Vegas was in full bloom and if your nascent casino was going to stand out, you had to do something bananas. Sure, you could hire Lenny Bruce to play the main room, but for a family-oriented place it was far less risky to send a couple of guys into the sky for two months. And that’s exactly what The Strip's latest den of ill repute—which is to say family fun—The Hacienda, did.

Enter Robert Timm and John Cook, two men with very light social calendars. Their job was to stay aloft for as long as possible in a Cessna 172. The 172 was known to be reliable and easy to fly, but it still needed gas and Timm and Cook still needed sustenance. Thus began an exercise so insane, it’s not only a wonder it worked, but one could easily imagine it inspired the CIA’s CORONA program.

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We won’t spoil the ending, but suffice to say Timm and Cook were airborne for 64 days, 22 hours, and 19 minutes. That’s longer than Burt Rutan’s 1986 non-stop circumnavigation of the globe—he only spent nine days up there. As for Timm and Cook, it was probably 64 days, 22 hours, and 18 minutes longer than they ever wanted to see each other ever again.

The world’s longest flight spent more than two months in the air [via CNN]