Word: cockpit
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...crew of men with long-handled mops to swash off the wings with antifreeze. "With this load," said MacWilliams, "we need every bit of lift we can get." He climbed into the plane, checked the guy ropes holding the huge burlap rice sacks, moved on to the cockpit and, with the help of his Chinese copilot, got his engines sputtering, then roaring. The plane took...
...Navy's new two-place jet fighter, the Douglas XF3D-1 Skyknight, has a special "escape chute" to help its crew bail out. When the pilot decides to abandon ship, he pulls a toggle. The seatbacks swing away. A door at the rear of the cockpit opens, exposing a passage sloping down and back toward the belly of the plane. At the end is a second door with two leaves. The rear leaf flies off into space. The forward leaf is pushed out hydraulically to form a windscreen. When escaping crewmen slide down the chute, the screen softens...
...streamlined cylinder built into the belly of the plane. The pilot in distress would crawl into it and pull a handle. A parachute would then open and drag the cylinder out of the rear of the plane. A more elaborate device (kinder to the pilot) is a detachable cockpit that can be blown free of the plane by a set of explosive bolts...
Another system would require a plane of odd design, putting the cockpit in the rear just ahead of the tail surfaces (see drawing). When the pilot wanted to bail out, he would detach the whole tail-and-cockpit. The plane would fly on, while the tail cone pulled a parachute from behind the pilot's seat. When it had slowed the cockpit to a safe speed, the pilot could bail out with his own parachute...
...m.p.h.); front-wheel drive, all-round torsion-bar suspension, a fabric top that rolls up like a windowshade. Perhaps the strangest-looking car at the Paris show was the Dyna-Panhard's "Dynavia" whose ultra-Studebakerish use of glass gave it the air of an airplane cockpit (its two-cylinder engine gets 30 miles to the gallon...