Word: ferrets
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...statement, followed by a question-and-answer session at Forbes Air Force Base, near Topeka,Kans., Captains Freeman B. Olmstead and John McKone (TIME cover, Feb. 3) told newsmen what happened to them after their RB-47 was shot down over the Barents Sea last July while flying a "ferret" mission to test Russian radar defenses. Their story of personal bravery under intense cold war pressures left unanswered the question of why the Air Force had kept them bottled up for so long...
...were beginning a mission that was vital to U.S. security. Their bomb bays were crammed not with high explosives but with delicate electronic gear designed to measure the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet radar defenses. Theirs was a flight far different from that of Francis Powers. Theirs was a "ferret mission" of a sort that has been carried out for years by U.S. ships and planes patrolling the long coastline of the Russian heartland. The Navy bomber shot down over the Baltic in the spring of 1950 was on a ferret mission. So was the Air Force C-130 transport...
...author, an English-born Welshman, writes well of two boys poaching rabbits with a ferret and a terrier, of women clacking 18 to the dozen after church, of the deaths of children and grandmothers in the choking mines. He also gives a good picture of a night raid on a tollgate, but does not trouble himself to explain the social chaos that led to the building of the gates...
Last Call. But the ferret flight that left from the U.S. base in the English town of Brize Norton on July 1 was destined to become a brief but acrimonious international incident. The plane was an RB-47, the reconnaissance version of the Air Force's workhorse medium jet bomber. It was scheduled to fly the routine ferret run off the Soviet Arctic coast, a triangular course (see map) around the Barents Sea plotted to keep the ferret plane at least 75 miles away from Soviet territory. At 3:03 p.m., upon reaching the appointed spot about 300 miles...
...plane and shot it down. For the Russians, the kill presented no problem. It was broad daylight. The weather was clear. The plane presumably was flying at its assigned altitude of 12,000 ft., within easy reach of the most obsolete fighter, and on the course other U.S. ferret planes had regularly flown before. But the Russians must have planned carefully. U.S. monitors listening in on Soviet command channels heard no messages transmitted between Russian bases and the plane...