Word: aloft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Once the plane got aloft, everything went so smoothly on the two-hour 36-minute flight to nearby Paine Field that Wygle radioed: "I hate to quit. This airplane is a delight to fly." Beaming happily, Boeing President William McPherson Allen, 66, predicted: "We'll still be selling lots of these airplanes when Allen's in an old men's home-and I hope that won't be too soon...
There is a pleasant conspiracy aloft these days, namely that although the air lines fly basically the same planes with the same equipment in the same time over the same routes, each airline is somehow distinctly and deliciously different. The sky's the limit for any frill or frippery, from gourmet menus to miniskirted hostesses, that will make the passenger exclaim, "Vive la difference...
Whatever the showmanship, it is the stewardess who carries the brunt of being both star attraction and hard-working housemaid. What with jet flights getting shorter and menus growing longer, the stewardesses' life aloft is a kind of hell in the heavens. There are as many as 195 guests to greet, seat, serve ancj-within reason-sate, and the girls must perform like a whirlwind combination of Jean Shrimpton, Gwen Cafritz, a short-order cook and a nurse for all ages. One Western Air Lines time-motion expert, for instance, has figured out that on an 85-minute flight...
...flexi-firm tethers, attached to either side of an astronaut's belt, could be clamped anywhere on the spacecraft, effectively fixing him in position and thereby giving him work stability and leverage. Thicker, stronger versions could be used as construction parts in space and on the moon. Shipped aloft coiled, they could then be set permanently in any needed position by turning a cable-tightening screw...
Hallelujahs Aloft. Having made his decision, McDonnell approached the future the way he approaches a business decision: detached, deliberate, precise. He had already worked out a 50-year plan for his career. Now he juggled the details to fit aviation, deciding among other things "to intern until age 40 before making a serious attempt to set up my own company." Says McDonnell today: "The plan went just about the way it's happened." He earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from M.I.T. ('25), enlisted in the Army Reserve to learn to fly. He remembers "singing hallelujahs...