Word: engineless
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...Maine. As Nichols puts to sea in dodgy weather, the reader in his armchair considers omens (a necessary and enjoyable preliminary to the sport of reading about other people's mad adventures). Nichols is a highly experienced professional sailor, and Toad, his engineless 27-ft. sloop, is as strong and seaworthy as he and his ex-wife, whom he calls J., could make it. But now the marriage has broken up, and Nichols plans to put Toad up for sale. Before he does, he takes a farewell voyage...
...spacecraft travel, this was surely the slowest trip on record-nine hours to cover all of 3½ miles. But as it moved from NASA's Vertical Assembly Building to launch pad 39-A at Cape Kennedy last week, the mammoth Saturn 5 rocket, an engineless version of the vehicle that will take the first U.S. astronauts to the moon, crawled through an impressive catalogue of superlatives. This was the largest rocket in the world, emerging from the largest building in the world, to travel on one of the largest self-propelled land vehicles in the world...
...Chutes. As every student of World War II knows, sailplaning as a sport grew up in Germany. The Treaty of Versailles forbade Germans to build a powered air force, so future Luftwaffe pilots had to learn to fly in engineless craft. At first, they hedgehopped for short distances along the hillsides, depending on air currents deflected upward by the slopes to keep them aloft. But in 1921, gliding down a slope in the Rhon Mountains, a German airman noticed a flock of storks suddenly shooting upward more than 1,200 ft. without so much as flapping a wing. He turned...
Sailplaning as a sport grew big in Germany between the world wars. Reason: the treaty of Versailles forbade Germans from building a powered air force; so future Luftwaffe pilots learned to fly in engineless craft. In the process, they perfected soaring techniques and wing designs that have influenced sailplaning all over the world. Today's sailplanes look and act like birds: slim of fuselage, with wings so disproportionately long that the best craft have glide ratios of 40 to 1, or 40 miles of reach for each mile of altitude. World sailplane distance record: 535 miles...
Davis contends that the reverse is true: the Polynesians sailed to Peru. To prove it, the Miru journeyed engineless 6,750 miles from New Zealand to Peru via a current that flowed in exactly the opposite direction to the one used by the raft Kon-Tiki. This part of the voyage took 67 storm-tossed days...