Word: glider
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Silent Flight. Somewhere above 1,000 ft., gliders are turned loose to soar, dropping a wing to lose altitude quickly, gliding downward to gain speed (which may reach 90 m.p.h.), or "picking up a thermal" to rise. Sometimes they even fly in formation. Another man-made addition to flight skill is the complete loop-the-loop, as exciting in a glider as in the oldtime barnstormers' crates. (Two pilots practicing a dog fight at Twentynine Palms -not a usual glider function -crashed and were killed when their wings touched.) A glider pilot, landing, keeps his plane balancing...
Advanced practice includes an hour of night flying and a little instrument flying. But there can be no practice in what glider pilots dread, even the most experienced -bad weather. For there is no substitute for a motor in escaping a storm. A student's last week of practice is devoted to troop carriers...
Rumors spread in Washington last week that gliders of great size and in huge numbers are on order, even being delivered. Certainly the Army is starting a big campaign for glider recruits.* But the most that Colonel David M. Schlatter, the top Army glider man, would say: the Army is buying nine-seat gliders for transition training between the three-seaters and the larger troop carriers...
...Talk. The really fantastic talk is on what gliders can do. Glider tows can at least double, sometimes triple the carrying capacity of towing planes. And a plane need not necessarily land to pick them up. By a new secret device, pickup can be made from the air without a destructive jerk...
When they consider the prospect of 10,000-mile planes in the next year or two and the obvious reduction in transoceanic travel and freight costs if gliders were used along with them, glider prognosticators feel more than ever like Tom Swift...