Word: air
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Grammer soon set about converting the outfit from pulps to slicks. In two years he built Mademoiselle to 300,000 circulation, later added the other women's magazines. Today the only traces of a man's world around Street & Smith are Astounding Science Fiction and two slicks, Air Trails Pictorial and Pic Sports Quarterly. Grammer says they are thriving. But in case they should ever weaken, S. & S. would be, as usual, ready with its six-shooter...
Muroc is the U.S. Air Force's secret test base. Its ships, as un-nautical Air Forcemen insist on calling aircraft, are the latest planes, from the big B-36 to Buck Rogerish craft that are still marked "Top Secret." Muroc is the world's finest landing field. A deliberately overloaded bomber can labor for miles across the lake before it tries the air. An experimental jet fighter of unproved design can be tested and wrung out, with worlds of room for landing if there is a structural or power-plant failure. Muroc's miles & miles...
Hole in the Wall. Walled off from the world by the desert and the strictest military secrecy, Muroc Air Force Base is a strange sort of community. In all it does, it is dedicated to military aircraft performance, with special emphasis on speed. In the realm of speed it also has its king. He is Captain Charles ("Chuck") Yeager, 26, a modest, blue-eyed test pilot with an infectious grin and an easy West Virginia drawl. What makes Chuck Yeager outstanding, even among the crack pilots at Muroc, is the fact that his name is certain to go down prominently...
Demon on the Tail. In the long-ago (to airmen) days of October 1947, the air was like a prison with invisible steel-strong walls. There seemed to be an upper limit to speed. As airplanes flew faster & faster, strange things had happened to them. Hard, unseen fists punctured their metal skins. Mysterious arms reached out of the air to wrestle with their controls. Sometimes a wartime fighter pilot, diving too fast in combat, would feel his stick freeze fast. No matter how he tried, he could not pull out of the dive. Sometimes he did not live to tell...
When a body moves with the speed of sound, the air does not yield smoothly. Instead, hard shock waves (sound waves) form. These are no gentle whispers; they are tough, speeding shells of compressed air, powerful enough under certain conditions to tear an airplane to bits...