He's 97. He Flew In Zero Gravity. And He Just Set A World Record.
Robert Gordon McAfee served his country during World War II, spent decades afterward as a passionate aerospace enthusiast and supporter of the space program, and harbored a lifelong dream he never stopped chasing: to experience weightlessness, to float free of gravity even just for a moment, the way the astronauts he had followed and admired for so many years had done. At 97 years old, that dream came true. McAfee boarded a specially modified aircraft operated by Zero-GravityX and flew a series of parabolic arcs that created brief, genuine periods of weightlessness inside the cabin, becoming the oldest person in history to fly in zero gravity and earning an official Guinness World Record title in the process. Guinness World Records adjudicators were on board to verify the achievement as it happened, and McAfee, floating freely inside the aircraft, experienced something that remains out of reach for most people regardless of age.
The record attempt had been in the works for some time, with McAfee first speaking publicly about his dream in early 2025 and the Zero-GravityX team working to make it happen safely and with the care his age required. Zero-gravity parabolic flights work by having the aircraft fly in a series of steep arcs, with each arc producing roughly 30 seconds of true weightlessness as everything inside the cabin falls freely together, giving passengers the same sensation astronauts experience in orbit. McAfee's achievement follows in a lineage of remarkable older fliers, including Ed Dwight, the first Black astronaut candidate, who became the oldest person to fly in space at 90 aboard a Blue Origin rocket in 2024. For McAfee, the flight was not about competition or comparison but about something more personal and more universal: the belief that curiosity and a sense of wonder do not have an age limit, and that some dreams are worth chasing all the way to 97.
