Word: floating
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...flyer bails out at 35,000 to 40,000 feet and pulls his rip cord at once, he will probably suffocate in the thin-aired substratosphere during the first of the 24 minutes it takes him to float to earth. But if he holds his breath for 30 seconds and plummets a while before opening his parachute, he will retain consciousness...
...bumped down the clifflike deck." Seamen flung themselves overboard to escape the runaway shells. Thorpe himself slid down a rope into the thick, oil-coated sea, let go, realized with horror that he had not blown enough air into his lifebelt. He thrashed his way to a cork float...
...away. She was lying on her side. Down the great red expanse of her underside, men were sliding into the sea. Suddenly I felt a shock at the base of my spine. I knew it was a depth charge from a destroyer hunting the U-boat." Clinging to the float with other survivors, Thorpe watched the stricken Eagle go. "A rumbling as the sea poured relentlessly into the vessel . . . a flurry of white foam. It subsided and she was gone." A destroyer's crew plucked Thorpe out of the waves...
Gliders take the air at from 25 to 45 m.p.h. When one of the Army planes at the school starts out along the ground, towing three two-place glider trainers on graduated ropes, the little 300-lb. ships take off first, float about 50 ft. up, pointing their noses down to give the ropes some slack so that the plane can get off. Once in the air, like the yachtsman who watches the trembling sail lest it spill the wind, a glider pilot must keep his towline taut or suffer a jerk when it suddenly springs tight. Even...
...Education and Paul McNutt's War Manpower Commission were deeply concerned last week because a quarter of a million men, physically fit, had been rejected for illiteracy, lack of education, low mentality. Draft boards had turned up 177,000 more who did not know whether a boat would float in water, but who were not physically fit, either. Largest group of ignoramuses were neither aliens nor Negroes, but native whites...