Word: groundful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Graceful as they are in the air, today's jetliners have become increasingly awkward on the ground. Taxiing under their own power, they use inordinate amounts of fuel; maneuvering them in maintenance areas and hangars is tough and timeconsuming. And such troubles will only grow worse with the introduction of the 490-passenger Boeing 747 and the supersonic transport. One way to solve the problem, say engineers of Seattle's Aero-Go Inc., is to keep the planes aloft even when they are on the ground. They have done just that by developing a device that can literally...
Hole in the Doughnut. Aero-Go's gadget goes to work after ground crews have rolled a plane's wheels onto small, dolly-like platforms. Underneath each platform are air bearings-flat disks made of plastic-fabric materials. When air is pumped into the disks, they assume a doughnut shape, raising the platform and its heavy load from 1 to 3 in. As the bearings become inflated, air escaping through perforations in the doughnut seeps underneath it. That thin film of escaping air suspends platform and plane above the concrete surface...
...shoved sideways in a cramped hangar by a small tractor. The awkward task of calibrating a plane's compass* will also be eased by the new device. The big planes will be floated onto a 46-ft. diameter turntable that will be suspended 3 in. above the ground on air bearings. A tractor will then turn the plane to any angle on the freely rotating turntable, eliminating considerable maneuvering and excessive wear on the tires...
...Because an aircraft's metallic structures and its electronic instruments can cause its magnetic compass to give incorrect readings, the compass must be adjusted after installation, as the plane is pivoted through a full circle on the ground...
...seemed perfectly valid to me," says Oldenburg today. "A kind of identification with earth, a recognition that earth is worth looking at, like sculpture. Taking the earth out of the ground, you are left with a cube, a nice geometric piece like Tony Smith's box, while the mound we excavated was a ground-up cube. We had a negative and positive cube-a conceptual thing." To most people, of course, a hole in the ground remains a hole in the ground. Who would ever think of it as a negative cube? Only a conceptual artist like Claes Oldenburg...