Word: motorless
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...glider, as everyone knows, is a small, motorless, extremely light-weight airplane. It usually takes the air by coasting down a hillside to gain sufficient momentum. A more modern method is to hold the glider steady, attach to its nose a shock cord made of rubber bands. Tension is applied to the shock cord and, on a given signal, the glider is flipped suddenly into the air like a pebble from a slingshot. An automatic release hook then drops the shock cord. Once in the air, the pilot of a glider must depend on air currents. Usually he circles around...
...cars. As the flying train passes over a city, the rear plane is uncoupled. It circles noiselessly to earth. Passengers alight. Their train has vanished down the sky to leave other passengers at other cities. At some terminal city the "locomotive" will descend. ... In an experiment at Karlsruhe, a motorless glider, manned by a pilot, was successfully towed aloft and cut free and brought to earth. Engineers predicted the rest. Needing very little velocity to stay aloft, several gliders would be no great drag on a multi-motored ship, the chief problem lying in getting them off the ground...
...hours and 21 minutes a creature soared silently, with motionless wings, near Koenigsberg, Germany, one day last week. A thunder shower forced it to earth. It was the glider Goethen, holder of the previous world's record of 5 hr. 40 min. for motorless heavier-than-air craft with pilot and passenger.* It bore Ferdinand Schulz and a companion. Pilot Schulz's skill lies in utilizing air currents after leaving a lofty takeoff, as do eagles and other birds capable of staying aloft for hours with never a wing beat. He declares he is confident...
...improvement of gliders in Germany so that eventually, as a correspondent reports, "wind-borne motorless flights, revolutionizing human transport can be made for hundreds and thousands of miles...