Word: cockpit
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...runway's edge, peering through the mist to count all he can see of a curving line of carefully placed black panels. Another sets up a stepladder at runway's end, climbs to the top (where he is almost as high as if he were in the cockpit of a landing plane) and counts the runway lights and markers that gleam through the weather. What each man sees is one more measure of visibility on the field. Automatic instruments keep a continuous record of wind, temperature and fog density...
...night this week, pushed the stick forward and prepared to land. Suddenly the pilot noticed that the plane's hydraulic system was out of order, and that one of the landing wheels was stuck in its casing. King pried open the trap door in the floor of his cockpit, wriggled into the narrow passage in the wing of his aircraft and tried to lower the wheel by hand. For 90 minutes he wrestled in the darkness of the wing while his copilot circled Seoul, burning up surplus fuel that might roast them alive if they crashed. But the wheel...
...Potez 75, a weird-looking antitank craft with a podlike body hanging between twin fuselages. It fires four guided missiles which unreel up to 1,968 yds. of wire in flight. By means of electrical impulses sent through the wire, a man in the cockpit, sitting at a stick similar to the pilot's, guides the missiles...
...electrical system and that of a Sabre as there is between a doorbell and a television set." For a full year, engineers worked on ejection seats to bail the pilot out in case of emergency. Because the friction heat at 600 m.p.h. raises a plane's cockpit temperature enough to roast the pilot, the F-86 had to have a cooling unit with the power of 35 household refrigerators; because it would run into temperatures of 65° below at high altitudes, it needed a heating unit capable of warming 30 average houses...
...supersonic age, Kindelberger and other planemakers face a new challenge to tax their ingenuity: the thermal barrier. At speeds contemplated for the near future, tough aluminum will lose much of its strength because of friction-generated heat (titanium will replace it for many uses). Cockpit canopies of today's materials will soften like putty; present-day electronic equipment may fail. The U.S. will have its hands full keeping ahead on such problems. Despite the success of the Sabre in Korea, Kindelberger does not underestimate the mechanical ability of the Russians. Says he: "Our conception of the Russian is crazy...