Word: cockpits
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Training Thunderbolt pilots is tricky business-one reason why the plane was delayed in reaching combat. There is no room for an instructor in the cockpit. The pilot is on his own in mastering speeds of 420-plus m.p.h., learning how to pull out of 680-m.p.h. power dives that can hurtle the P47 to safety when its ammunition is exhausted. In early days, many a student pilot forgot that a Thunderbolt can dive a mile in six screeching seconds, needs thousands of feet for the simplest maneuvers...
...feet. Within a couple of minutes the ball-turret gunner had shot down an Me-110 trying to get us, and the radio operator had been wounded. We were getting pretty banged up. Then a fighter made a quick pass at us and sent a shell crashing into the cockpit. Our copilot, Steve Bellovay, was hit clean through the breast pocket. He slumped over the instrument panel, but the pilot never wavered a second. He held her steady, straight on toward the target...
...three) proudly reported that they learned rapidly. Male teachers found that bluster did not work with these pupils, as it did with some men students. One instructor's stock warning to careless and irritable trainees: "Come on now, honey. Let's stay in the cockpit and fly this thing through...
...learned to venerate the old-line, wind-beaten, open-cockpit veteran of the Air Corps. They told each other the story of the night he stood on a London rooftop observing a German air raid. The Nazis' aim was wild, the bombs fell helter-skelter. Spaatz began to fume and curse, suddenly roared: "The damn fools are setting air power back 20 years...
...Annapolis, playing football) was all Navy: a bear for work, a hater but an understander of red tape, not a liberty hound, never so tired he could not jack his tired men. Bob Milner, the squadron's Executive Officer, was the opposite of relaxed Lou Kirn. In the cockpit he jumped around like a monkey, twisting knobs, pushing levers, pulling his hood open and slamming it shut again, punching out Morse-code messages to his wingmen with his fist. But he was a smooth flyer who led a dangerous division. On the cots in front of their tents...