"That was Venus. Nothing but nothing — except it scared me. It was like circling a haunted house in the middle of deep space. I know how unscientific that sounds, but I was scared gutless until we got out of there. I think if our rockets hadn't gone off, I would have cut my throat on the way down. It's not like the moon. The moon is desolate but somehow antiseptic. That world we saw was utterly unlike anything that anyone has ever seen. Maybe it's a good thing that cloud cover is there. It was like a skull that's been picked clean — that's the closest I can get."
"When I was about eight years old, I was watching the sunset, and I asked my dad, "What’s that bright star over there?", and he said that it wasn’t really a star at all, but it was actually a whole planet called Venus. [points at the sky] Which should be over there soon. He said, "You know why they called it Venus? Because they thought it was so beautiful and glowing. And what they didn’t know is that it was filled with deadly gases and sulfuric acid rain," and I thought, This is it, I’m hooked."
— Dr. Arroway, Contact
Physics calculations give us an idea of what flight [on Venus] would be like. The upshot is: Your plane would fly pretty well, except it would be on fire the whole time, and then it would stop flying, and then stop being a plane.
The atmosphere on Venus is over 60 times denser than Earth's, which is thick enough that a Cessna moving at running speed would rise into the air. Unfortunately, the air it's rising into is hot enough to melt lead. The paint would start melting off in seconds, the plane's components would fail rapidly, and the plane would glide gently into the ground as it came apart under the heat stress.
A much better bet would be to fly above the clouds. While Venus's surface is awful, its upper atmosphere is surprisingly Earthlike. 55 kilometers up, a human could survive with an oxygen mask and a protective wetsuit; the air is room temperature and the pressure is similar to that on Earth mountains. You need the wetsuit, though, to protect you from the sulfuric acid. (I'm not selling this well, am I?)
The acid's no fun, but it turns out the area right above the clouds is a great environment for an airplane, as long as it has no exposed metal to be corroded away by the sulfuric acid. And is capable of flight in constant Category-5-hurricane-level winds, which are another thing I forgot to mention earlier.
Venus is a terrible place.
"The universe is hilarious! Like, Venus is 900 degrees. I could tell you it melts lead. But that's not as fun as saying, 'You can cook a pizza on the windowsill in nine seconds.' And next time my fans eat pizza, they're thinking of Venus!"
