Word: aileron
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Warning Buzz. The first sign of trouble is a tiny buzz in an aileron, which means that a small standing sound wave is forming. Most pilots ease back when they feel it. But some are tempted. Said one: "You feel a surge of excitement and mischievous satisfaction as a gentle nibbling disturbs the controls. Some unreasonable devilment urges you to start the compressibility processes which in a few seconds can wrench all control away from you and plunge the ship into wild, tremendous vibrations...
...Douglas Navy plane was grounded in Kansas through loss of an aileron hinge. The Douglas plant, within easy flying distance, had plenty of hinges, but all were beinturned out under Army contract. The Navy plane had to wait ten days while it got its hinge through Philadelphia via Oakland, Calif...
...when he becomes excited and they were glistening now. And the imperturbable Commander Henry Howard Caldwell, who calmly flew his plane back from Rabaul on Nov. 5, 1943 with a dead photographer and a wounded gunner aboard, a plane with 154 bullet holes and one wheel and half an aileron gone, was behaving like an Annapolis plebe at one of the Navy football games-which also helped to make Caldwell famous...
...Still a first lieutenant in the peacetime Army, Doolittle resigned in 1930 and went to work for Shell Oil Co. In St. Louis he took off in a new Travelair racer, lost an aileron while he was testing the ship only 100 feet above the airport. Doolittle wangled the ailing plane to 300 feet and dropped out. His parachute broke his fall when he was ten feet off the ground. Then he walked around in circles, staring intently at the ground. "Looking for my rip cord," he explained. His elder son, Jimmy Jr., then ten years old, pointed...
...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...