Impossible Engineering (UK)

A shouty series on engineering opens with a look at HMS Queen Elizabeth, a new aircraft carrier, which, as the programme never tires of boasting, is very big indeed. A “floating goliath”, it has four acres of UK territory that can be deployed anywhere in the world – or will when it is finished. (There’s no mention here of the spiralling cost of the project – from £3.2 billion to an estimated £6 billion.) The doc charts the history of each design element from the ship’s turbine engines to the vertical take-off fighters it will carry, with an intriguing footnote on the short-lived Convair Pogo – a sweet-looking aircraft that took off and landed on its tail.

The Rion-Antirion Bridge, which runs for 3kms and links the town of Rio on the Peloponnese peninsula to Antirrio on mainland Greece. Located in one of Europe's most active seismic zones, its engineers had to conquer the problems of deep water, high winds and constant land mass movement to build the colossal structure.

A look at the Shanghai Tower, which at a height of 632 metres is the second tallest building in the world, With a weight of 850,000 tons, it has been built to withstand winds of typhoon proportions.

The construction of Kansai International Airport upon the largest man-made island in the world, in Osaka Bay, Japan. Pioneering innovators from the past such as Pierre Danel, who developed a system against the pounding sea, and 19th-century mechanic Richard Dudgeon made the project possible. The development of airports including Berlin's Tempelhof Airport and London's Croydon Airport are also explored to reveal how engineers attempted this feat of engineering.

Experts analyse the work of engineers including Sir Nigel Gresley, who engineered the world's fastest steam train in 1938 and Eric Laithwaite, whose linear motor made frictionless travel a possibility. These innovators influenced the engineering of the Shanghai Maglev, the fastest passenger train in operation on Earth, which broke numerous engineering boundaries in its construction. Held in place by a series of electromagnets, it levitates on an air gap of 10mm and is able to reach a top speed of 431kms per hour.

A look at the Airbus A380, which as the largest passenger plane ever built can carry more than 850 people non-stop nearly half-way around the world. With the largest wingspan of any commercial aircraft and four specially developed mighty turbo jet engines, the A380 weighs 560 tonnes and getting it off the ground would not have been possible without the work of past innovators such as George Cayley and Frank Whittle. Key developments in aerospace engineering - from Richard Whitcombe's energy-efficient wing-tip designs to Nasa engineers' cutting-edge control system, Fly by Wire - helped bring the A380 to fruition.