Word: oxygenate
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...morning last week, drank a cup of black coffee, then went on to work at the Lockheed Aircraft Corp. plant in Palmdale, Calif. There, at Air Force Plant 42, ruddy, husky (5 ft. 8 in.. 170 Ibs.) Pilot Johnson squirmed into a pressure suit, picked up his helmet, oxygen mask and parachute, walked out to a dainty, needle-nosed F-104A Starfighter, a silvery sliver of jet aircraft with short (7½ ft.), knife-edged wings. Johnson checked the plane carefully: 5,000 Ibs. of fuel, no armament, a special package of instruments whose faces stared...
...Starfighter-50,000 ft., then 60,000, then 70,000. Laconically, Johnson radioed Edwards tower, made certain that the radar trackers still carried him on their screens. Now, 80,000 ft.: Johnson's pressurized cockpit altitude was 45,000 ft., and his pressure suit automatically inflated with oxygen from a bottle beneath his seat. His afterburner had long since lost nearly all its thrust, but Johnson kept coasting up. At length he knew that he could no longer hold the nose up in the thinning atmosphere, slacked off on the stick, nosed up and over, began the long drop...
...with flame, scattering red-hot pieces of steel across the wing and fuselage. The navigator had bailed out of the nose compartment; so had the pilot. Copilot Obenauf, squeezing along the catwalk toward the nose, was ready to jump too. He looked down and froze: there, lying unconscious, his oxygen equipment disconnected, his chute pack gone, was the navigator-instructor, Major Joseph B. Maxwell...
...wind roared through the open trap door, "Obie" Obenauf hurriedly searched for Maxwell's parachute. His body was weakened from lack of oxygen. He could not find the chute. He looked down at Maxwell again, felt an awful, strong urge to leave him. "Gee, I got my own battle to fight." Then Obie, just turned 23, five years out of high school, father of a ten-month old boy, father-to-be of a second child, turned around and crawled back into his rear cockpit and took control of the airplane on the chance that he might be able...
...Needle. He hooked his mask into the life-saving oxygen system, dove the bomber toward a lower altitude so Maxwell would not die of anoxia. The Plexiglas canopy had been jettisoned in the first attempt at bailout, so, as the plane knifed ahead at 400 knots, Obie's face was seared by the sharp, -30° wind, by whipped dust, bits of wire and insulation. His eyelids rolled back in the fierce air torrent. He dropped his amber-tinted visor over his tearing eyes-but he could not read his instruments again without lifting it. His gloved hands froze...