Word: aero
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...they use inordinate amounts of fuel; maneuvering them in maintenance areas and hangars is tough and timeconsuming. And such troubles will only grow worse with the introduction of the 490-passenger Boeing 747 and the supersonic transport. One way to solve the problem, say engineers of Seattle's Aero-Go Inc., is to keep the planes aloft even when they are on the ground. They have done just that by developing a device that can literally float giant jetliners over concrete aprons, taxiways and hangar floors on a cushion...
Hole in the Doughnut. Aero-Go's gadget goes to work after ground crews have rolled a plane's wheels onto small, dolly-like platforms. Underneath each platform are air bearings-flat disks made of plastic-fabric materials. When air is pumped into the disks, they assume a doughnut shape, raising the platform and its heavy load from 1 to 3 in. As the bearings become inflated, air escaping through perforations in the doughnut seeps underneath it. That thin film of escaping air suspends platform and plane above the concrete surface...
...Kitchen. Aero-Go is also building bearings for other uses. It has put them on experimental models of small, airborne cars propelled by large fans and designed to move people as easily as planes. The Navy plans to use the bearings for hauling giant ship propellers and shafts around the Pearl Harbor shipyard. NBC has bought air bearings to shift heavy bleachers around TV studios, and several manufacturers are already using them to move heavy equipment and products across factory floors. Air bearings placed under a one-ton machine, for example, enable a workman to move it across a smooth...
...bearings can be connected to any convenient source of compressed air and usually require little pressure. Aero-Go has even developed a fourelement air bearing device that will enable a housewife to shove a 600-lb. refrigerator around the kitchen floor. Its power source: the exhaust air flow of an ordinary vacuum cleaner...
Their most secure foothold is in science. They are telling us things about molecular structure and aero-dynamics. In hard-to-quantify sciences like linguistics or psychology they are partly hamstrung; they can't tell the difference between sentences like "Fruit flies like a banana" and "Time flies like an arrow." But they have created their own languages which people must use to communicate with them, and these computer languages throw light on the mysteries of human speech...