Word: pilote
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...noon; the bright summer sky was partly covered with clouds. Flight 624 of United Air Lines, nine hours out of Los Angeles and two hours east of Chicago, was purring sweetly at 17,000 feet over ridge-ribbed central Pennsylvania. In his four-engined 300-m.p.h. DC-6, Veteran Pilot George Warner Jr. received his clearance from the traffic-control tower at New York City's La Guardia Field-meaning that he could let down gradually in the next 230 miles for his approach to New York...
Eight thousand feet below, Pilot Earl Bach, plugging along toward Philadelphia in a DC-3, heard the radio exchange. At 12:33 Pilot Bach's ears were stung by another message from Pilot Warner. It was terse: "New York, New York, this is an emergency descent." Said Bach: "I could tell from the pilot's voice that they were in bad trouble...
Whatever the trouble was, Pilot Warner knew it was bad too. It let him, his copilot, his 39 passengers and two stewardesses live just eight minutes longer. When the trouble struck, the DC-6 was not far from Sunbury. Minutes later, down to 900 feet, it was plunging through a valley, skimming a mountain, and apparently heading for a small airport at Shamokin. The runway was not long enough to take his 70,000-lb. ship, but the pilot might have risked a belly landing. Flyers there could not figure it out; the big plane's motors sounded...
General Omar Bradley, the Army's versatile Chief of Staff, did a little low-level navigation outside his old home town of Moberly, Mo. Flying in from Washington through rain and poor visibility, the general peered out the window, spotted a few landmarks, guided the confused Army pilot safely to the airport...
Other facts & figures were seeping out to the public. According to good authority, the speed reached by the rocket plane was probably above 1,000 m.p.h. When its oxygen & alcohol fuel was exhausted (after about two minutes at full power), the pilot had to land with dead controls, at 160 m.p.h. Two XS-1s have been built, the first for the Air Force, the second for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Both have reached supersonic speed, and four more of them are on order...