Word: airman
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...claw at the untried plane, shake it, spin it, hammer it, try to tear it to ribbons. Some tests are extra tense. The maiden flight of the X-3 a few months ago was one of the touchiest in aviation history. The pilot: Bill Bridgeman, a husky, clear-eyed airman who had already flown faster (1,238 m.p.h.) and higher (79,494 ft.) than any other...
Impressive Calm. The man who does this sort of job over & over again is 36 and bald. Bill Bridgeman has bright blue eyes, which seem more intent because of deep little airman's creases spraying out from them across his bronzed cheeks. He stands 6 ft. 1½ in. tall, and has the big-shouldered build of a lifeguard. (During his college vacations he did serve as a lifeguard at Santa Monica beach, where lifeguarding is ranked among the decorative arts...
These rock-steady traits did not grow out of a conventional childhood. Bill was born in Ottumwa, Iowa (present pop. 33,631), of English-Dutch ancestry. His parents (his father was an airman too) separated when he was a baby, leaving him to be raised by his paternal grandmother. When he got pneumonia, she took him to California to build up his health...
...Airman Bridgeman views the "heat barrier" calmly. He does not seem alarmed by the prospect of flying an airplane whose windows are too hot to touch. He is not optimistic, either, about the ultimate outcome. "The sound barrier," he says from experience, "wasn't too bad. It was sort of like jumping over a fence. But the heat barrier is like fighting your way into a thicket of thorns. The farther you get into it, the more thorns stick into...
Next day there were two more items of news about Airman Fischer. The Peking radio announced that he had bailed out and was a prisoner-and quoted his service number correctly. In Las Vegas, Nev., his wife, accompanied by three-year-old Harold III, appeared before a judge in a suit filed weeks ago and got a divorce...