Word: aircraft
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...armada in Indochina since the war last peaked in 1968. More than 150 fresh planes were rushed to the theater from bases as far away as North Carolina; the B-52 fleet has been nearly doubled since the North Vietnamese offensive began. When Midway and Saratoga join the four aircraft carriers now on station off North Viet Nam, the U.S. and the South Vietnamese will have 150 ships and over 1,000 aircraft, equipped with some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the history of warfare to use against a North Vietnamese force...
...slightly before 2 a.m. of what was to be the first warm and sunny Sunday of the year in North Viet Nam. Suddenly, inside the big Soviet-built area surveillance radar stations near Haiphong and Hanoi, the radarscopes exploded into life with the blips of approaching aircraft-more than the technicians had seen at any one time in years. After a moment, the images smeared and the blips disappeared, as if overtaken by some evil magic. The radarscopes filled with impenetrable "snow"-or simply went dark...
...sharks: 17 B-52s. The B-52s dropped their 30-ton bomb loads into the darkness over Haiphong from 30,000 feet. The explosions destroyed a petroleum tank farm near the Haiphong harbor quay, provoking a fireball so large that it was seen from the bridge of the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk 110 miles out at sea in the Gulf of Tonkin...
...focused on massive bombing of the infiltration routes in Laos and Cambodia. The Communist offensive changed all that. Within South Viet Nam, U.S. pilots have been flying a punishing 500 sorties a day, up from only 20 a day before the offensive (a sortie is one flight by one aircraft). For the pilots, attacking North Vietnamese tanks or defending beleaguered South Vietnamese troops has been a welcome change. "We'd all rather bomb targets we can see," says Captain Rick Elder, 27, an A-37 pilot based at Bien Hoa, north of Saigon. "It's a little...
...thin, cigar-shaped 500-Ib. bombs had been attached in clusters to her long, swept-back wings (total span: 185 ft.). At 10:30 p.m., as low-hanging clouds raced past a sickle moon, a beat-up bus unloaded 6623's six-man crew for the night. The aircraft commander, Captain Ed Petersen, a 27-year-old graduate of the Air Force Academy, walked around the big plane, flashlight in hand, with the sergeant who was in charge of the ground crew. Petersen spotted a suspicious puddle of liquid beneath the plane. "I drank it. It's water...