Word: payloaders
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...Bell X-1, which is hardly an airplane. It might be more accurately described as a winged, piloted rocket. It carries four tons of fuel (alcohol and liquid oxygen) and burns it all in 2½ minutes of full-power flight. With its heavy construction, straight wings and negligible payload, the X-1 is considered a sort of dinosaur among fast-flying aircraft. But it is still useful as a laboratory testing device...
...glazed the runways. Seattle Air Charter, one of the U.S.'s brood of nonscheduled airlines, postponed the eastbound flight of its DC-3 for an hour, then two hours. The big commercial lines had canceled all flights. But the owner of the DC-3 had a big payload waiting impatiently for a ride-27 Yale students from the Northwest had chartered the plane for the trip back to New Haven after the Christmas holidays...
Adding up the payload for a single westbound flight, Pilot Stewart finds on his bill of lading: the blonde, who is a truant from her honeymoon, an escaping embezzler (Porter Hall), a G.I. and his bride, a corpse, a shipment of whitefish, some live lobsters and a cigar-smoking chimpanzee. Before the flight has ended, the passengers have jounced through a forced landing (made partly because of weather, partly to pick up a few rustic gags from amiable Farmer Percy Kilbride, who keeps the New England accent flying in darkest Oklahoma), and reached several forced decisions...
Higher & Higher. Most rocket-borne research, said Dr. Van Allen, has been done by V-2s captured in Germany. Up to July 1, 31 of them had been fired at White Sands Proving Ground, New Mexico, "with upper atmospheric equipment as the primary payload." Twenty-one flights were successful, and one of the rockets reached an altitude of 184 kilometers (114 miles). Some of the information gathered was sent back by radio "telemetering." Other rockets blew off their noses, so that the instruments and records in them would hit the earth less violently. Parachutes brought some instruments drifting gently...
...carrying instruments above the atmosphere. It has "two-stage propulsion." A booster brings its velocity to 300 meters per second (670 m.p.h.) and then drops off. After that, a "sustaining" rocket motor speeds it to 1,300 meters per second (2,900 m.p.h.). The Aerobee has carried a payload of about 150 lbs. to 115 kilometers (71 miles...