Word: javelins
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...weight-lifting machine built of broomsticks and her mother's flatirons. She beat boys at mumblety-peg, whizzed past them in foot races and razzle-dazzled them in basketball. Still in her teens, she burst into the headlines as the hit of the 1932 Olympic Games, winning the javelin throw and the 80-meter hurdles. She disdained lipstick, plastered her hair back, talked out of the side of her mouth with a thick Texas drawl and riveted reporters with such remarks as: "Are you the guy who took pictures of my feet in Jersey...
...Coming Delta. Most interesting sights of the show for future-minded airmen were carefully guarded glimpses of the Gloster GA5 Javelin interceptor and the Avro 698 bomber. Both are delta-wings, which British (and some American) designers believe are the coming thing for practical supersonic flight. Neither plane was permitted to show its full performance, but the big Avro 698, flown by hot-rod Test Pilot Roland Falk, went into a vertical bank 200 ft. above the viewing stands. It was only the fourth flight for the 698. Said a top U.S. plane manufacturer as the Avro shot past: "That...
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...
Before developing the Sapphire and the Javelin, Sopwith faced two major decisions: 1) should the engine's compressor be axial flow or centrifugal?; 2) should the plane be delta-winged or twin-boomed (like the U.S.'s old P-38)? He chose axial flow, even though Sir Frank Whittle, who pioneered jets, advised the other; Sopwith thinks the Sapphire proved his own judgment right. His choice of delta-wing at first shocked Sopwith's crack designer, Sydney Camm, who dashed off to Yorkshire to seek "The Skipper," crying: "I won't have...