Word: missions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Five planes began the mission from California's Castle Air Force Base; one, after a mechanical failure, dropped out in Labrador, and another landed by prearrangement in England. Every detail had been attended to: worldwide communications and weather services, precisely timed geographical check points, State Department clearance, stand-by refueling planes. For the flyers themselves, there was steak (cut into bite-size pieces), canned chicken, ice-cold milk, fruit juice, soup, freshly baked cakes, candy bars. At four or five strategic places along the route (the exact number is secret), the jet-age birds dropped down from their...
...offhand. Reporters crushed around as LeMay stitched through the line-up of glad SACs and pinned the Distinguished Flying Cross on each man. Families of some of the crewmen swarmed in to greet them. Newsmen herded one and all into a briefing room. Did Russia know of the mission? "Certainly, Russia knew about it," replied the general. Were the bombers armed? "This was an unarmed mission," i.e., no bombs aboard, but radar-controlled tail guns carried ammunition...
...midyear, SAC will take delivery on its first Boeing KC-135 jet tankers, which, had they been in operation last week, would have cut about six hours off the round-the-world mission. *Since the flyers traveled at about half the speed of the earth (1,000 m.p.h. at the equator), the time span between sunrises was compressed to 16-hr. "sun days," half light, half dark. They caught their first sunset over the Great Lakes, a few hours after their i p.m. takeoff, thereafter saw the sun rise and set at eight-hour intervals, i.e., sunrise over the Atlantic...
...most of Aramco's Americans come to Arabia with no sense of mission. In Dhahran they have created a Levittown complete with automatic dishwashers, bowling alleys, ladies' socials and nightly movies. Their pay is 25% above comparable jobs in the U.S. and tax free-but they growl about the heat, curse the dust, and count the days until they can return home and buy that restaurant or farm with the money they have saved. Saud's rigid Moslem code imposes added irritants. Books are banned (apparently in fear of subversive literature). Wives are irritated by the Saudi...
...Aramco forget that it is a private enterprise allowed to exist only by sufferance of the King. To underline the point, King Saud has gone out of his way to assert his political independence of the U.S. After a four-year trial, Saud politely ejected a Point Four mission on the ground that it was too bossy. In 1953 the Saudi government accepted a military assistance agreement, only to cancel it before it went into effect because it was contingent on too much U.S. supervision. The U.S. was allowed to build the Dhahran airfield itself only with the stipulation that...