Word: airstrip
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...safe or simple job. But even for case-hardened veterans, the Nigerian civil war presents one of the meanest assignments yet. Merely getting in and out of Biafra is a dangerous and doubtful proposition. The irregular airlift from Lisbon flies through Nigerian antiaircraft fire to reach a makeshift airstrip that is only open at night. When correspondents finally manage to get in, they are shuttled off to quarters in the Progress Hotel in Aba, the country's provisional capital. When they are not in the field, they face the hazards of the Progress menu. This consists of yams-fried...
Neatly lettered in yellow across a new airstrip that opened last week at New York's La Guardia Airport gleams the word STOL, an acronym for short takeoff and landing. La Guardia's STOLPORT, as the 1,095-ft. runway has already been dubbed, is first of its kind in the U.S. to offer commercial airplanes those desirable qualities...
...Finding the airstrip (in Biafra), that's a problem sometimes," McGuire says. Biafra's sole airstrip is a hard-top road slightly widened by cutting away at the jungle on both sides. It is lit by two rows of lights, none of them very strong. The outboard engines of the four-engine Constellations hang out over the brush, which, if it fouls the engines, means an abrupt end to the flight...
...certain feeling; you get to be like a cat or some kind of an animal sometimes." The flight to which McGuire transferred was supposed to be a dangerous one. Its pilot, since given other duties, carried the sobriquet of "Mr. Magoo." It landed safely at the Biafran airstrip, and McGuire waited in vain to meet friends on his former flight, but "they got clobbered...
Kerosene-Lit Airstrip. Relief officials estimate that Biafra needs daily food imports of at least 200 tons, a target that a fly-by-night air lift of chartered old Constellations has not been able to meet. A bare trickle of supplies has been flown in, some by the Vatican. The flight into Biafra is a dangerous trip through radar-guided Nigerian antiaircraft fire to a secret, kerosene-lit airstrip that one pilot describes as "little wider than a bicycle path." A medicine-laden aircraft crashed last month, killing its American pilot and two other Americans...