Word: mache
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Backfire is made of stainless steel with titanium to resist the heat stress of supersonic flight, and has an airframe skin bonding (instead of riveting). The plane's wings are in a forward position for long-range cruising and are jackknifed back about 40° for speeds of Mach 2.1 (about 1,400 m.p.h.) at 50,000 ft. or Mach 1 plus (760 m.p.h.) at 500 ft. Backfire is apparently crammed with sophisticated electronic aids to confuse radar tracking. Carrying a crew of three, the plane has an estimated payload of 50 megatons in weaponry, including parachute-dropped hydrogen...
...contractor was Long Island's Grumman Aerospace Corp., builder of the Navy's long-awaited F-14 fighter, a swing-wing Mach 3 jet that is designed to waylay any enemy missile-armed bombers sent to attack American ships. In 1969, the Pentagon awarded Grumman a contract to build 722 of the planes, figuring to pay $11.5 million for each of them, or $8.3 billion for the lot. But last April, a Grumman official formally announced to Navy headquarters that it had become "commercially impracticable" for his company to construct more than the 38 planes that...
Within twelve minutes we were over the outskirts of Le Havre. It was 9 a.m. when we broke the sound barrier-Mach 1. Up there it comes with a whimper, not a bang. I had to be told that we had passed Mach 1 cruising at 30,000 feet; we felt only a slight whisper of movement, hardly a shudder, as the plane continued to climb...
...were at Mach 1.9 and still picking up speed; 9:16 and ten seconds ... 20 ... 25. The pilot raised his thumb in a gesture of triumph. A few seconds later we were flying at twice the speed of sound -which, at our altitude of 50,000 ft., came to nearly 1,300 miles an hour...
...this height, I leaned over and looked at a sky I had never seen, and may never see again. Cobalt blue at the edge of my sight, deepening and darkening as my eyes slid upward. No clouds here, no mist or haze. Cruising at Mach 2, ten miles above the earth, the plane probably has less vibration than a normal jet and the same interior noise level. The Concorde is narrow and somewhat claustrophobic, which may make it uncomfortable for some. But for me that feeling paled before the mind-boggling way in which it shrank the world...