Word: mid-air
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...nightingale's cage." > A drunken Episcopal priest who has forgotten his liturgy may utter a valid prayer: "Let us pray for all those killed or cruelly wounded on thruways, expressways, freeways, and turnpikes. Let us pray for all those burned to death in faulty plane landings, mid-air collisions and mountainside crashes. Let us pray for all those wounded by rotary lawn mowers, chain saws, electric hedge clippers and other power tools. Let us pray for all alcoholics measuring out the days that the Lord hath made in ounces, pints and fifths...
...onslaught begins under the opening credits. A B-52 bomber nuzzles up to a jet tanker for mid-air refueling while the sound track pours forth an unctuous ballad called Try a Little Tenderness. Cut to Burpelson Air Force Base, where General Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden) launches the offensive against Russia, then severs communications with SAC. Hayden's playing seems extremely right. His Ripper is impotent, a one-man military complex who means singlehanded to save the world from water fluoridation and other Communist plots "that threaten the purity and essence of our natural fluids." He alone knows...
...build up steam is a Chase named Barrie, who dances a wicked deadpan twist. Mad World reaches its nadir with an abortive climax that puts Spencer Tracy and ten comedians atop a fire ladder reeling several stories above the street, presumably on the assumption that eleven men suspended in mid-air will be eleven times funnier than Harold Lloyd used to be. Alas, the law of diminishing returns prevails...
...letting him try for the Naval Air service. "I wanted to swat the Germans," he explained. Cabot was 54, but he passed his test and flew antisubmarine patrols around Boston Harbor in a seaplane hunting eagerly for Germans he could swat. Still bedazzled by the promise of the air age, he experimented with a variety of inventions, patented a system by which planes could pick up air mail and other bundles from sea sleds while still in flight, and established pioneering research into the principles and mechanics of the ticklish art of mid-air refueling-which is today a commonplace...
...that matter, actual mid-air collisions occur much oftener than most people realize. Federal agencies have recorded seven so far this year in U.S. airspace, and a total of 438 (most of them involving small planes) during the past quarter century. The collision danger increases steadily as more and more planes take to the air, and as air speeds increase. The faster planes are traveling, the less time pilots have to avoid a threatened collision. Once two high-speed jets on a collision course get within a mile of each other, a crash is inevitable: at 600 m.p.h. they will...