Word: apt
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...could understand it better. Labovitz agreed that Bergethon seemed sincerely interested in solving problems, but he criticized the other deans for "rapping him (Labovitz) on the knuckles." At any rate, a dean would have to be somewhat naive not to realize that any call to his office is apt to be intimidating to a certain extent...
Unintended Record. Captain Apt was too good and also too lucky. He followed the plan with consummate skill, and he hit every green light. The X-2 made a perfect drop from her mother plane. Her rocket engine ignited at exactly the right moment. Milburn Apt put her into precisely the right climb, and when he reached the assigned "bend-over" altitude (70,000 ft.), he leveled her off perfectly and let her rip. Nothing whatever went wrong. The rocket engine burned perfectly, and the fuel lasted nine seconds longer than it had ever lasted before. The speed climbed past...
When the fuel was gone, Captain Apt reported calmly on his radio: "The engine has cut out and I'm beginning to turn." After six seconds of silence he spoke an unintelligible word, almost a shriek. A few minutes later his battered body was found in the cockpit capsule, which had plunged to the desert far below...
Bucking Airplane. Air Force authorities say that they know pretty well what happened, but that they cannot give much detail without disclosing precious information about the X-2's behavior and design. The broad facts, however, are that both pilot and ship performed far too well. Captain Apt had been told not to watch his machmeter, the common speed-measuring instrument. His accelerometer, the key speed instrument in this case, could not be read directly in miles per hour. So, when he reached peak speed, he probably did not know how fast he was going. After his engine...
Writers are passing strange, and those who herd together in writers' colonies are apt to be stranger still. Perhaps the strangest writers' colony on the North American continent is located in rolling corn-hog country on the outskirts of Marshall, Ill. (pop. 2,960) and looks rather like a struggling boys' camp, with two rows of barracks, a central cookhouse-cum-library and a pond swimming pool. Its founder and reigning queen is a bright-eyed, single-minded housemother of the literary arts named Lowney Handy...