Word: aloftness
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...North American skies were far from empty. Aloft were 1,800 NORAD fighter planes, from long-ranging F-101s to speedy new F-106s on some 6,000 intercept sorties. On the radarscopes of distant destroyers and aircraft, of early-warning stations from the Canadian Arctic and Alaska to towers planted deep in Atlantic waters, appeared a multitude of bogey blips. They were caused by about 250 Strategic Air Command B-478, B-528 and refueling tankers, along with Vulcan bombers of Britain's Royal Air Force. Many of these planes were homebound from foreign bases; others had slipped...
Imaginative Attack. The technical papers testified to an eagerness to try anything, however difficult or bizarre, that might move the U.S. toward space. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration showed models of satellites already in orbit or soon to soar aloft-beautiful machines with the strange, angular, functional grace of well-designed space craft. North American Aviation, Inc. showed a full-scale model of its giant F-1 rocket engine, which spits out more than 1,500,000 lbs. of thrust and whose tail cone is as large as an Eskimo igloo...
...more difficult job. In 1958-59, Bowen got Australian air force jets to carry dust-collecting apparatus up as high as 45,000 ft. There they found plenty of dust, but higher flights were needed for rigid proof that the high-altitude dust had not merely been blown aloft from the surface of the earth...
...fire tests above the earth's atmosphere, as the U.S. did on a small scale in Project Argus (August-September 1958). But a big, rocket-borne test involves intricate problems in technology; countless things could go wrong. A premature explosion on earth, or too early an explosion aloft, could contaminate the atmosphere with radioactive products. All tests in the atmosphere, including last week's Soviet test, will surely raise the level of the earth's radioactivity. The dirtiest tests in the past were fission-fusion-fission bombs, the first of which, exploded...
...contestants at Wichita needed thermals-columns of warm air-to stay aloft and they knew just how to find them. Towed to 2,000 ft. by powered aircraft, the sailplaners looked first for a "salad bowl"-a cluster of rising sailplanes already airborne and circling slowly, as if stirred by some giant ladle. Failing that, the entrants looked for the big cotton bolls of cumulus clouds-the typical sign of updrafts-or for wheeling hawks, those skillful natural riders of the wind. Having hooked a thermal, the sail-planers got from it every last inch of altitude, then drifted...