Word: gloster
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Britain last week showed off a delta-wing plane, the Gloster Javelin, which its builder thinks is the fastest, longest-range, all-weather day & night fighter ever built. Nobody needed to guess who the builder was. It was T. O. M. Sopwith, the first lord of British aircraft and a big name in British aviation for nearly 40 years. When Germany's top World War I ace, Von Richthofen, was finally shot down, Canada's ace Captain Roy Brown, in a Sopwith Camel fighter was credited with the kill; when the Germans came back...
Sopwith also turns out the Sapphire jet engine, whose 8,300-lb. thrust (at sea level) makes it, so the British claim, the world's most powerful in production.* And his new Gloster Javelin is the first fighter strong enough to use the full power ot these big engines. In test flights last week, the Javelin shot from the ground to higher than 30,000 ft., outrunning the sound of its own screaming jets. All its performance data is still carefully kept secret. But the R.A.F., which is thriftily chary of building anything but prototype planes, liked the Javelin...
...public got a good look last week at Britain's spectacular new interceptor, the Gloster GA-5. Photographed for the first time in the air, the bizarre, dartlike R.A.F. plane marks a milestone in aviation: the coming-of-age of the "delta" wing...
...cold, thin air, high over Britain's Severn River one day last week, a sleek ground-attack fighter zoomed through its paces. Its twin jets roaring at full power, the sturdy Gloster Meteor suddenly whipped up into a vertical climb. Slowly its speed dropped off until, just before it stalled, the pilot cut the power in his port engine. Like a great, improbable pinwheel, the plane revolved through a tight circle (see diagram). Three-quarters of the way around, the pilot cut the power in his starboard engine. Momentum kept the Meteor revolving until it completed a turn...
...years.* Squat, studious-looking Pilot Zurakowski flew with the R.A.F. after escaping from a Nazi prison camp, has three Luftwaffe kills and three probables to his credit. One day about a year ago, at a test-pilot school bull session, the discussion got around to the maneuverability of the Gloster Meteor. "Zura," a test pilot for the Gloster Aircraft Co., said the plane was good enough to do a "Fin Sling," a cartwheel-like stunt he had been thinking about for a long time...