Cars are driving themselves, scientists have taken over the brains of dragonflies to pilot them like drones (for real – HERE), and at some point AI will revolt and society as we know it will cease to exist.

But hey, on the bright side, check out this meta treat – a plane drawing the outline of itself in the sky with its own flight path.

During an 18-hour endurance test that took place on Wednesday, the crew of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner managed to pull off the rather impressive feat.

Fortune below:

Flight tracking sites such as FlightAware show the jet’s path resembled the outline of a 787 above 22 U.S. states.

“With time to spare in the air,” the testers “got creative” with their flight path, the Chicago-based plane maker said on its website. Eighteen hours of flight time theoretically covers the distance between Singapore and San Francisco, or Perth and London.

The plane’s wings spread from the north of Michigan to southern Texas, and Boeing said the nose of the outline has a meaning: it’s “pointing at the Puget Sound region, home to Boeing Commercial Airplanes,” according to the company’s website.

A closer look at the flight pattern:

That’s pretty darn impressive, but the best may still be to come:

…the 18-hour, 9,905-mile flight was used to test new Rolls-Royce engines that will power the 787-10, a stretched variant of the Dreamliner.

Bigger, better and further.

[source:fortune]