Word: air
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Four days later a C-54 tried again, this time releasing a glider and two-man crew for an air-ground pickup. Twice the tow plane managed to snare the glider on a pickup line. Both times the glider broke through the icy crust and bogged down in the snow; the pickup line snapped. The glider's crew joined the nine stranded men on the icecap. More food and clothing were dropped, along with heaters, fuel and a collapsible plywood shelter. The shivering airmen burrowed into the snow, rigged a canvas roof overhead as protection against the gale...
...third rescue attempt the glider was safely loaded and picked up. It lifted 50 feet into the air before the towline snapped. A week later it,happened again with a new glider. Two more airmen were left stranded. By Christmas Day, the C-47 survivors had been down for 16 days, and the original seven-man group had swollen...
This week, with no rescue yet in sight, the Navy joined the operation, sent the carrier Saipan north from Norfolk with three Piasecki ("Sagging Sausage") helicopters, each capable of carrying eight passengers. The red-faced Air Force ordered up ski-equipped planes and called in famed Arctic flyer Colonel Bernt Balchen, who had commanded the Air Force's first successful glider rescue in Alaska fortnight...
...Along with Bluie West Eight, a wartime code name for the Air Force's Greenland bases. In the same area, during the war, six P-38s and two B-17s were forced down...
...after Christmas, the great Berlin airlift was six months old. By then, it had carried 700,000 tons of supplies to besieged Berlin. That meant an average of 3,800 tons in an average of 550 flights a day (one-third by Britain's R.A.F.). Last week, Air Secretary Symington said that in 1949, when new planes are put into operation, the daily total can be doubled. So far, 17 Americans and seven Britons have been killed in airlift accidents...