Word: gearing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...coming of peace had made it obsolete, and it seemed appropriate that the plane designed to carry 700 soldiers or vast quantities of military gear, up to and including a 35-ton Sherman tank, had as its cargo hundreds of beach balls, installed on Hughes' orders for flotation. A few of them are still kicking around inside the great, hollow fuselage. The outside of the Goose is a beautiful white, though it was aluminum colored when it flew. The ribbing inside looks like metal, but it is in fact neither metal nor spruce but laminated birch stuck together with...
...Gear down," reported a chase jet, buzzing alongside and counting off the altitude: "50 feet . . . 40 . . . 5-4-3-2-1-Touchdown!" As its rear wheels made contact, the flight director in far-off Houston told his tense crew: "Prepare for exhilaration." Nine seconds later, the nose wheels were down too. Columbia settled softly onto the lake bed. Young had floated the shuttle along 3,000 ft. beyond the planned landing spot, able to use its surprising lift to make a notably smooth touchdown. As it rolled to a stop through the shimmering desert air, The Star-Spangled Banner rattled...
...second night when an alarm light flashed and a bell jolted Young and Crippen out of their reveries. It was a warning of a malfunction in a heating unit on one of the three auxiliary power units for Columbia's hydraulic systems, which control the landing gear and elevens. The heater keeps the unit's fuel from freezing up. A throw of a switch got it working again, but Columbia is such a masterpiece of engineering redundancy that any one of the units could have saved the day. Said Flight Director Neil Hutchinson: "It's absolutely amazing...
...make an exit, he urged Houston to get the reception crews to speed up their "sniffing" chores-ridding the ship of noxious gases with exhausts and fans. When he was finally allowed to emerge, 63 min. after touchdown, he bounded down the stairs, checked out the tiles and landing gear, then jubilantly jabbed the air with his fists. It was probably Young's most uncontrolled move of the entire flight...
Leon Leonwood, always well-protected from the elements in his Bean gear, ran the operation himself until he died at the age of 94, in 1967. "He was strictly a 19th-century character," Bean public affairs director Kilt Andrews insists. But the stout-hearted State of Mainer, who hailed from the Bethel area, possessed at least a little savvy when it came to business. His chamois shirts, his touring canoes and campstoves, and most of all his Maine hunting boots supported a $4.75-million mini-empire when he expired...