Engineering.

The 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, crossing the Dardanelles Strait in Turkey, opened March 18, 2022 with a main span of 2,023 meters — surpassing Japan's Akashi Kaikyo Bridge (1,991 m) by 32 meters. No longer span is currently under construction.

Victor Vescovo piloted the DSV Limiting Factor to 10,934 m (± 3 m) at the bottom of Challenger Deep, Mariana Trench, in 2019 — a hull built to withstand roughly 1,100 times atmospheric pressure. This is the most rigorously documented extreme-pressure engineering achievement of any crewed vessel.

The Taisun gantry crane at Yantai Raffles Shipyard, China, lifted a water-ballasted barge weighing 20,133 tonnes on April 18, 2008. The lift used a self-ballasted barge rather than a discrete fabricated structure — a narrower category than lifting manufactured cargo, but Taisun's Guinness-certified figure remains unmatched by any subsequent lift.

A Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird, crewed by Capt. Robert C. Helt and Maj. Larry A. Elliott, reached 25,929 m (85,069 ft) in sustained horizontal flight on July 28, 1976. A separate, higher figure — 37,650 m by a MiG-25 in a near-vertical zoom climb (Alexandr Fedotov, 1977) — is the official FAI absolute-altitude record, but that was a brief ballistic peak, not sustained flight, which is why this record uses the SR-71 figure instead.

USAF test pilot Maj. William "Pete" Knight flew the rocket-powered North American X-15A-2 to 7,274 km/h (Mach 6.7) on October 3, 1967, over California. It remains unbroken as of 2026, nearly six decades on.