Word: aloftness
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...condemned to a permanent sense of anticlimax, he gave no sign of it. In the aftermath of the flight, Lindbergh earnestly devoted himself to exploiting his fame for the sake of developing aviation. And aviation needed it. In 1927, in all the U.S., fewer than 9,000 people went aloft as passengers on scheduled airlines (compared with 109 million last year). Between accepting medals, he flew the Spirit of St. Louis to every state in the Union, pleading the future of aviation in a high, reedy Midwestern voice. Though he turned down million-dollar contracts for movies and cigarette endorsements...
...recorded by Anne in Listen, the Wind!). The report he submitted to Pan Am embodied the same pragmatic realism he had shown in equipping the Spirit of St. Louis, and helped change the shape of airplanes. He argued that it was more important to design an airplane to stay aloft and fly over or out of danger than to add intricate, heavy features that might or might not help in a forced landing. This is general airline doctrine today...
...MIGs had suddenly become a threat. For one thing, they said, the Communist jets have forced many U.S. pilots to jettison their bomb loads so as to lighten their planes for impending dogfights which, as often as not, failed to materialize. For another, when the MIGs are aloft, U.S. planes fly closer to the ground to avoid becoming targets -and that makes them more vulnerable to intense flak and small-arms fire. Moreover, as one Air Force general put it, if the MIGs were forced to retreat to Red Chinese airfields, their effectiveness would be drastically reduced, since they would...
...time individualist, whose own philosophy of life was that "it is very short and should be lived to the hilt," a proposition he assiduously followed by buying himself a 500-m.p.h. brute of a war-surplus F-8-F Bearcat, in which he buzzed the Yale Bowl and roared aloft in fantastic aerobatics, sometimes before the enthralled crowds at air shows, more often just for the pure, unadulterated hell of it; when his Bearcat plowed into a hill 15 miles from Cortland, N.Y., on his way to Ithaca, for a lecture at Cornell...
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...