Word: lighter-than-air
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...trifling job compared to the 81-hr. Canal Zone flight from which the Akron had last month returned. Only distinction was the presence aboard of seven guest officers, most notably Rear Admiral William Adger Moffett, chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, hard-bitten champion of the Navy lighter-than-air program. He it was who fought and won the airship cause, against a stone wall of official opposition raised by the crash of the Shenandoah in 1925. Other guest officers were Commander Fred T. Berry, last skipper of the decommissioned Los Angeles; Lieut.-Colonel Alfred F. Masury of the Army...
...private railway. That year he saw a balloon ascension at a Sao Paulo fair. Sent to Paris at 18 to finish his education, he had his first balloon ascent at 24 with Machuron, designer of Explorer Salomon Auguste Andree's famed balloon. Straightway he began fiddling with lighter-than-air craft, built ten airships of which No 6 won the 100,000-franc Deutsche prize for the first flight around the Eiffel Tower. His airships solved one by one the problems of shrinking & expanding gas, buckling, lateral balance. Then he moved on to heavier-than-air machines. He never...
...staff of six airplane pilots assigned to the Akron had begun regular duty. Commanded by Lieut. Harrigan they put in a day of "belly-bumping," making 104 take-offs and hook-ons in three hours, more than had been made in three years of experiments. Stationed aboard a lighter-than-air craft, among a lighter-than-air personnel, the "belly-bumpers" are extremely proud of their identity as a heavier-than-air detachment...
Died. Alberto Santos-Dumont, 59, one of the "fathers of aviation," Brazilian-born, credited as one of the inventors of powered lighter-than-air craft; of arteriosclerosis; in Bello Horizonte, Minas Geraes, Brazil. In 1901 he piloted one of his airships around the Eiffel Tower. He was not successful with airplanes until more than three years after the first successful flights of the Wright Brothers...
Proud as Navy lighter-than-air men are of the great new Akron, most of them have a strong affection for "the old L. A." Nearly all prefer to travel in her because, built as a peace ship, she has comfortable quarters in a gondola like the Graf Zeppelin's. Aboard the warlike Akron officers & crew (except the captain) are tucked deep in the ship's bowels. More fundamental is the Navymen's admiration for a ship which was the training school of practically all the lighter-than-air personnel; which flew some...