Word: pilot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...airplane aloft that morning was a sleek, four-engined DC-7B, newly completed at the Douglas plant in Santa Monica and destined for delivery to Continental Air Lines. The $2,000,000 airliner had been lifted skyward on its maiden flight by Test Pilot William Carr, 36, for a trial turn over the Pacific at 10,000 ft., then back in a climbing arch over the valley to 25,000 ft. The four-man crew logged a routine test. Twice Santa Monica's Clover Field received position reports radioed by Copilot Archie Twitchell, 51, whose 34 years of flying...
...Midair Collision!" Twenty-five minutes after Carr's DC-7B took off from Santa Monica, Northrop Test Pilot Ronald E. Owen, 36, swished skyward from an airport some 50 miles to the northeast, near the desert community of Palmdale, in an F89 Scorpion twin jet interceptor. The Scorpion, equipped with new radar, was soon to be returned to the Air Force. Owen and Radarman Curtiss A. Adams, 27, were flying a final chore: three runs at another jet 25,000 ft. up, to test the ingenious radar mechanism that puts the interceptor on the trail of invading aircraft, fixes...
SAMURAI!, by Saburo Sakai, with Martin Caidin and Fred Saito (382 pp.; Dutton; $4.95), sweeps through the South Pacific with all guns firing as Pilot Sakai and his squadron of Zeros effortlessly shoot U.S. planes out of the sky. In five seconds over Port Moresby, four Airacobras are sent spinning into the sea. Another time the Japs down six of seven null without the loss of a Zero...
Incredible? Author Sakai, who is billed as "Japan's greatest living fighter pilot," claims a total of 64 "confirmed" kills of U.S. aircraft. His close friend, the late Hiroyoshi Nishizawa, is credited by the Japanese with over 100. Nothing to prove it, of course.* Figures aside, Pilot Sakai was quite a flyer. During the Guadalcanal campaign he was put out of action when he jumped four Avenger torpedo planes, barely made it back to Rabaul. He lost an eye in the battle, and his description of how he was operated on without anesthesia is bloodcurdling. Sakai fought again...
Much of the book reads like the memoirs of any other fighter pilots of World War II-German, British and American. But there are startling differences, as when Sakai carefully explains the Japanese reluctance to wear parachutes: "It was out of the question to bail out over enemy-held territory . . . No fighter pilot of any courage would ever permit himself to be captured by the enemy...