Word: aloftness
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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...
...mammoth, McDonnell insists, could well prove to be a synergistic compound?a union in which one and one add up to more than two. McDonnell, for example, is building an "airlock" which astronauts hope to couple to a spent-but-orbiting Douglas-built Saturn rocket stage; spacemen would live aloft for a year in the airlock's safe, two-gas atmosphere. Now that Douglas and McDonnell can plan and build that equipment together, the job should become not only easier but more profitable?and the cross-pollination of ideas between two sets of engineers may lead to new and more...
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...