Word: b29
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...week to having an airplane, the Douglas D558-II Skyrocket, that has flown faster than sound "many times." Like the Air Force's pioneering XI, the Navy's Skyrocket is a rocket plane. But the X-I is intended to be dropped at high altitude from a B29, while the Skyrocket takes off under its own power. Inside its slim body is a powerful turbojet engine as well as the rocket motor. The turbojet is used first (with rocket assist at takeoff), to get the plane to high altitude. Then the rocket motor pushes it to supersonic speed...
...weather worsened. But the third evening, a search pilot picked up unmistakable signs of debris from the sunken B29: a cluster of red and yellow boxes, a slab of aluminum, a bobbing flotsam of abandoned baggage. Another search plane was just heading back to base when its tail gunner thought he spotted a light. The plane turned back and at that moment the castaways decided to risk one of the last flares. "We knew then," said the search pilot, "that we had found them...
...Boeing Airplane Co. is famed around the world as the nest which hatched the Flying Fortress and the B29. But citizens of its home town, Seattle, think of it in more practical terms-it is their biggest payroll and a financial well which waters the city and a great part of the country around it. This summer, with a postwar peak of 26,000 employees working on B-50s, on doubledecked Strato-cruisers and on sub assemblies for its jet-powered B-47, it was supporting one in seven families in Seattle...
Chuck knew now that the B-29 was in a flat power glide to increase its speed to 240 m.p.h., minimum flying speed of the loaded X-1. "B29 eight zero zero," chanted Major Cardenas, "30 seconds to drop time...
...Piece. Silently and smoothly the X-1 cut away from the B29. For an instant it drove forward and downward. Then Chuck turned on the nitrogen pressure and fired the lox and alcohol in one of the rocket chambers. A spurt of white dots (visible shock waves) spurted out behind and grew into a long plumelike "contrail" (condensed water vapor...