Word: pilote
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Over the weekend, on a visit to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base at Dayton, he demonstrated his capabilities as a pilot by flying a 6-25 bomber on a 25-minute hop. He was still going strong, still finding the country wonderful, still looking, forward, with no perceptible glazing of the eyes, to visiting the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Las Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Sun Valley, Idaho...
...news "beat" is here too, all the way: Horace Greeley in an interview with Brigham Young, in which Young first admitted to 15 wives (1859); Henry Stanley of the Tribune finding Dr. Livingstone (1872); the world's first airplane flight, reported exclusively by the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot (1903); the London Daily Telegraph revealing Kaiser Wilhelm's war plans in another exclusive, this time an interview (1908). these are the headline stories of their times, and they cannot but thrill the reader still, for with the dust blown off them they jump from yellowed pages like the four-alarm fires...
...from California to Great Britain was having trouble with its radio compass. The pilot asked for a radio bearing, got it. It was three hours later when Kindley Air Force Base in Bermuda heard from it again. This time the message was terse, urgent: the B-29 was running out of gas and preparing to ditch. A few minutes later the Coast Guard cutter Bibb heard a faint SOS. After that, there was nothing...
...weather worsened. But the third evening, a search pilot picked up unmistakable signs of debris from the sunken B29: a cluster of red and yellow boxes, a slab of aluminum, a bobbing flotsam of abandoned baggage. Another search plane was just heading back to base when its tail gunner thought he spotted a light. The plane turned back and at that moment the castaways decided to risk one of the last flares. "We knew then," said the search pilot, "that we had found them...
...match are graphic, often moving; but except for interpolations of hindsight, Karig's history seldom rises above the work of the better on-the-spot reporters. Future historians will read this big job, done with loyalty and likable gusto, only for passing footnotes and occasional colorful quotations (one pilot's description of the night battle in Mindoro Strait: "It looked like hell upside down...