Word: muroc
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...scheme before deciding the little beasts were too difficult to handle. Miniature bombs made of celluloid and filled with napalm gel were attached to the bats with surgical clips, and the recruits hibernated in cold-storage chests until flight time. Then came the first test run, held at Muroc Lake, Calif, in May 1943. When released from the planes, many of the bats did not wake up, and plummeted to the ground like tiny kamikazes. Others drowsily flew off, never to report for duty again. One of the bats turned out to be a mole: it took refuge under...
Died. Robert James Woods, 52, chunky co-founder (in 1935) with the late Lawrence D. Bell (TIME. Oct. 29) of Bell Aircraft Corp., who designed the X-1 jet, the first plane to fly faster than sound (at Muroc, Calif., in 1947), of a heart attack; in Grand Island...
Dawn was breaking over Edwards Air Force Base at California's Muroc Dry Lake when the husky, dark-browed test pilot chugged up to the flight line in a battered model A Ford coupe. Lieut. Colonel Frank K. Everest Jr., 35, wiggled into his girdle-tight high-altitude suit, picked up his crash helmet and headed for the runway where a four-engined B50 waited. Clamped tight to the B-50's fat belly was "Pete" Everest's aircraft-a sleek, needle-nosed little job with "Bell X2" painted on its sides...
...Yeager. Exactly 20 minutes after he had been cut loose from the B-50, Pete Everest, gliding toward the field, was overtaken by a supersonic F-100 that had been left far behind by his wild ride, and escorted to a dead-stick landing on the dry bottom of Muroc Lake...
High above Muroc, Calif, last week, almost 50 years to the day since the Wright Brothers twirled their first pusher propeller, the Air Force's Major Charles E. ("Chuck") Yeager, 30, attained the highest known speed ever to be reached by pilot and plane. His rocket-powered aircraft (released from a B-29 bomber at 30,000 ft. for the run): the experimental Bell XIA, a new relative of the XI, with which Chuck Yeager first cracked the sound barrier in level flight (TIME, April 18, 1949). His speed: more than 1,600 m.p.h., 2½ times the speed...