Word: aileron
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Consolidated boat was at 18,000 feet over the Atlantic and the oxygen was sobbing comfortably in the crew's masks. Then it happened. Somehow the automatic pilot jammed. With its right aileron all the way down, the 15-ton Catalina went into a violent left turn, headed for the sea. In the dizzy spiral dive the aileron carried away, took part of the tip of the wing with it. Then the left aileron ripped off. An operator in the United Kingdom heard the frenetic chirp from the Catalina's radio: "Both ailerons gone...
...Attacked by several Messerschmitts, they shot down three, damaged two others. The youngest of them all, Gregory Augustus Daymond, 20, a Montana-born commercial pilot who once flew in South Africa for an ice-cream king, bagged one. At short range he shot away a " 'schmitter's" aileron, and the plane lurched and floated down so awkwardly that Daymond "didn't wait to see what happened because I was quite satisfied I had got him." Four days later in a similar action Eagle
...ship was snapped up into the most violent flying some of his veteran passengers had ever seen. Why he landed when he did is still a subject for investigation, which CAB started immediately. Meanwhile, Co-Pilot Crabtree quoted Captain O'Brien as saying that one of the aileron controls had snapped in the storm. If that should be found true, Trip 14's passengers and crew were lucky to be alive...