Word: aeronaut
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Born in Rockford, Minn., Van Gates was an automobile salesman and occasional racer in San Francisco in 1910, when he saw the French Aeronaut Louis Paulhan thrilling crowds at Tanforan Track. He decided there was money to be made in exhibition flying. For $2,000 he picked up a flimsy biplane built by a Kansas City doctor, took a Swiss aviator as partner. The Swiss looked once, briefly, at the biplane and vanished. Rather than see the machine rot on its wheels, Gates started the engine one day, mounted the rickety seat, started taxiing about the field just...
...oldsters were retired Broker Alan Ramsay Hawley, a round-faced, grey-haired gentleman who won the International in 1910; and famed old Aeronaut-Poet Augustus Post, an arresting figure of lordly carriage, with grey trowel beard, curling mustaches and somewhat rambling speech. He was Mr. Hawley's co-pilot on the 1910 flight in which they made an unofficial distance record which has never been surpassed-1,172 mi. Other oldtimers. proud of their kinship in the venerable clan of ballooning, came to congratulate Settle and Van Orman. (Their respective copilots were Lieut. Wilfred Bushnell, a portly, moon-faced...
...aeronautical designers, builders and editors who sailed down the Potomac from Washington last week for the annual show of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the one who had most fun was 60-year-old Pioneer Airman Orville Wright. Last year at NACA's laboratory at Langley Field. Va. he had seen the new half-mile testing channel through which seaplane hulls are whisked 60 m.p.h by an electric towing car. He had thought about it many times since then. Last week he gazed at it again, finally asked if he might have a ride. With Dr. Charles Frederick...
...home he is, of course, a national hero. He lunches with the President, is made a colonel in the reserve flying corps and runs into a rich and comely lion-hunter (Catherine Dale Owen), not a bit like Anne Morrow. It looks for a time as though the valiant aeronaut were guilty of treachery to the girl back home, who had sacrificed some property to finance the exploit. But in the end-you've guessed it-he renounces "the hero racket" over the radio, returns quite chastened to his native Maine, his twangy rustic cronies and his girl...
Robert Esnault-Pelterie, oldtime aeronaut of France, best known for his interest in shooting a rocket to the moon, sued Chance Vought Corp. last year on the ground that every plane it had built was an infringement of his patents. His reason: each of the planes was controlled in flight by a single stick ("joystick") operating ailerons and elevator, which he claimed to have invented. A victory in the Chance Vought case would have meant collection of fabulous damages from U. S aviation, as every plane has joystick control. Last week a Federal judge in Brook lyn dismissed the Esnault...