Word: bombers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...running fight with the Navy over the value of the long-range bomber if war should come, the Air Force holds that today's bomber has an advantage over the fighter aircraft. Last week the man who has charge of developing the Air Force's planes and weapons, General Joseph T. McNarney, Chief of the Air Materiel Command, backed his colleagues' views, but he added a note of caution. In the 1930s, he recalled in an interview, airmen had the same notion, but the supposedly invulnerable bombers got badly shot up by fighters early in World...
...Force point of view. His order would not wipe out the Navy's air arm or even reduce it. Its World War II carriers (21 all told, excluding light and escort carriers) would be on hand as a prime defense against submarines, and as floating fighter, dive-bomber and torpedo-plane bases. The Navy accepted the decision glumly and tersely. One flying admiral said: "On the record, no comment; off the record, no comment...
...Force's secret test base. Its ships, as un-nautical Air Forcemen insist on calling aircraft, are the latest planes, from the big B-36 to Buck Rogerish craft that are still marked "Top Secret." Muroc is the world's finest landing field. A deliberately overloaded bomber can labor for miles across the lake before it tries the air. An experimental jet fighter of unproved design can be tested and wrung out, with worlds of room for landing if there is a structural or power-plant failure. Muroc's miles & miles of smoothness have allowed many...
...Alcohol. The B-29 took off with Major Robert Cardenas, † one of the Air Force's best test pilots, at the bomber's controls. Followed by two F-80 "chase airplanes" (to observe the X-1 in flight), the B-29 circled to 7,000 ft. above the lake. Then Chuck, bundled in a flying suit and topped with a golden, hard-plastic crash helmet, climbed down a retractable ladder and squeezed through the door in the side...
Chuck Yeager could not see much, but he had plenty to do. Swiftly he checked the instruments, tried the controls and adjusted his oxygen mask. Outside he could hear the thunder of the B-29's great engines and feel the vibration as the bomber climbed higher & higher. He felt it wheel on a turn, and heard Major Cardenas' voice on the radio: "Am turning on downwind leg at 21,000 ft." Then the bomber wheeled again. "Am turning on the base leg," said Major Cardenas. "Five minutes to drop time...