Word: cutters
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...Queen's captain-a boyish-looking, 33-year-old ex-U.S. Navy pilot named Charles Martin-decided what to do. While he still had gasoline for almost three hours' flight, he doubled back toward the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Bibb, which" was on station as a weather ship about 900 miles northeast of Newfoundland. He found her, with fuel to spare. But as the plane settled lower, the tense and silent passengers saw a fearsome sight. The gale-driven waves were rolling 35 feet high and 100 feet from crest to foaming crest...
...plane seemed possessed of devils. It washed down on the cutter, crashed into the ship's hull and stove in its own nose. For seven hours, the cutter could do little but stand by as close as Captain Cronk dared, and make a lee as the plane's crew nervously jockeyed the Sky Queen's nose into the wind...
...matter how desperate, had to begin-the plane had begun to leak and many passengers were approaching the point of hysteria. Captain Cronk signaled a suggestion that the chief pilot call for volunteers. Three of the seamen got calmly into a rubber raft, were let down toward the cutter on a line and were safely picked up by coast guardsmen...
...wave which killed its engine and all but swamped it, too. Captain Cronk took the Bibb over to the swamped launch. As passengers began to be washed out of it, seamen leaped into the water for them; others reached out from life nets over the cutter's side to haul them to safety...
...commanding robot was a snarl of electronic equipment affectionately known as "the Brain." Everything it did on the long flight was "preset" before the start. In mid-Atlantic, the Brain picked up radio signals from a U.S. Coast Guard cutter. Later it picked up a beam from Droitwich, England, and followed that for a while. When the plane neared Brize Norton, the wide-awake Brain concentrated on a special landing beam from an R.A.F. radio and made a conventional automatic landing...