Word: mayday
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...weeks before his second child, a girl, was born), during preparations for flying the first manned U.S. space plane, the X-15, blond, handsome Iven Kincheloe, 30, died in an F-IO4 crash. His last words, radioed to the control tower at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif.: "Edwards, Mayday seven seven two-bailing...
...Mayday, Mayday." The storm warnings that flew Lake Michigan's length changed that night into "whole gale" warnings. Winds from the southwest gathered speed, rose to 40, 50, then 60 m.p.h. The Bradley beat its way through the mounting waves into the next day and the dusk. By then, the heavy seas were surging with 30-ft. waves, smashing at the 31-year-old vessel. In the pilot house. First Mate Elmer Fleming, 43, heard a thud. He spun around and looked toward the stern. The vessel was sagging aft of midships. Fleming made for the radiotelephone and cried...
...Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! Carl D. Bradley breaking up and going down twelve miles southwest of Gull Island . . . Any ships please come . . . Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday...
Coast Guard stations and ships snapped radio messages back and forth. Into the roily seas steamed rescue ships, and overhead, battering its way into the swirling winds, flew a Coast Guard plane. In Rogers City, the local radio operator got the Mayday flash. The awful word spread throughout the town. Terror-torn women clustered around radios; the wife of Wheelsman Joe Krawczak looked fearfully at the faces of her six small children...
Into the blood-stinging wind he flew. He called his "mayday!" SOS and got an instant response, first from an Air Force base at Altus, Okla., 200 miles away, then from another airborne B-47. Altus gave Obie a compass heading to come in on. His panel lights grew dimmer, his eyes burned like hot lead. He could see the compass needle but not the numbers. He turned his plane to bring the needle toward the heading he wanted: his own field, the Strategic Air Command's Dyess Air Force Base near Abilene, 150 miles away...