Word: gliderfuls
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Seconds after takeoff on his first try with a hang glider, a sudden gust of wind caused Craig Vetter to crash. He spent two months in a wheelchair, learning to hate what many disabled persons call the "chrome-plated torture rack." Now, one year later, Industrial Designer Vetter, 39, has put his own well-engineered, light, agile and elegant wheelchair design on the market. As yet custom made, Vetter's chair also comes in a sports model for wheelchair tennis, basketball or marathons...
...porpoise-shaped nose dropped slightly. Plunging earthward, Columbia was falling at an angle about seven times steeper than a normal airliner's descent and was traveling half again as fast. Powerful as it had been on takeoff, the ship was now functioning as a 102-ton glider with no engine to correct its course...
...working in space and vastly increasing its possibilities. Columbia is designed to ascend like a rocket, orbit as an all-purpose freight truck and passenger bus, ward off melting re-entry temperatures with an armor of glazed silica tiles, then land like an airplane?or like an 80-ton glider...
...Coca-Cola Heiress Frances Woodruff of Atlanta is said to be the oldest woman ever to ride and fly a hang glider. In Pampa, Texas, Plumber Ronnie Farmer, 29, ate 100 hot jalapeno peppers in 15 minutes, destroying the previous record (94 in 111 minutes) and probably his innards as well. In Japan, Hideaki Tomoyori has learned to carry the mathematical formulation pi (3.141 etc.) to 20,000 places, putting to shame his own earlier record of 15,151 places...
Except for the Phantom being downed, these remarkable pictures (all but one never before published) were shot by U-2 aircraft flying high over the Soviet Union as long as 24 years ago. The glider-like plane was conceived in December 1953 by the brilliant Lockheed Aircraft Corp, designer Clarence L. ("Kelly") Johnson, now 70, for one purpose: to gather hard data on Soviet military capabilities. Its mission was to soar beyond the range of any jet interceptor or antiaircraft missile and provide the photographic and electronic intelligence necessary for accurate military assessments...