Word: mustang
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Expense & Complexity. But getting JCS endorsement and getting the planes into the air were two different things. Today's planes are incredibly complex and expensive. For example, North American's World War II Mustang fighter cost $50,000 in production, and had 500 electrical connections. North American's F-86 Sabrejet costs $240,000 and has 6,000 electrical connections ("Each of these," moans North American's Board Chairman Dutch Kindelberger, "is a method of connecting one source of trouble with another"). The K-1 electronic bombing system used in the Boeing B-47 and Convair...
...every day. Currently, Communist propaganda is truculent, violent and fanciful. It accuses the U.S. of wrecking the peace talks (broken off by the Reds on Aug. 23); it claims to have uncovered a U.N. plan for amphibious landings on both coasts of North Korea; it avers that a captured Mustang pilot had in his possession target maps of Manchuria, which proves that alleged U.N. invasions of "Chinese air space" were planned and not accidental...
...Ever since the end of World War II, the development of such a weapon has been one of the Air Force's main points in the endless arguments over tactical air power. In an age of jet aircraft and atomic weapons, prop-driven planes like the famed F51 Mustang would prove too slow, too vulnerable to interception by enemy jets unless heavily and expensively escorted. The jets themselves could not maneuver fast enough for accurate low-level support work except in relatively flat terrain. Finally, said the Air Force, any "inhabited" plane, no matter how fast, stood a good...
...miles. Soon the sea 22,000 feet below gave way to icy ridges and plateaus. A Norwegian Air Force Catalina flying boat patrolling near Spitzbergen gave him a radio call as he whisked past, reported back that Captain Blair was right on course. Hour after hour, the Mustang bored through the blue-grey sunlit haze over the icecap. Blair sat hunched behind his oxygen mask occasionally shooting the sun with a sextant...
...came in over his set. Blair homed in on them, crossed Alaska's northern coastline just one minute off his schedule. He refueled near Fairbanks, roared east at 25,000 feet across Canada, munching a roast beef sandwich between gulps of oxygen. Nine hours later, he set his Mustang down on the runway at New York's Idlewild airport. He was the first man ever to fly solo across the hazardous North Pole route in a single-engined plane...