Word: pilote
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Zipping over Dayton's Wright Field in a sleek, twin-boomed Black Widow night fighter, pilot J. W. McGuyrt reached for a new lever in his cluttered cockpit. He looked back at his passenger, and pulled. A telescopic gun tube exploded a 37-mm. charge and sent First Sergeant Lawrence Lambert, still strapped to his seat, whooshing upward out of the plane, 20 feet above the onrushing tail fins. Three seconds later a second explosion in the air snapped Lambert's safety belt and ripped the seat away. A third blast automatically opened his chute. After that...
...success of the A.A.F.'s new pilot ejection seat would be welcome news to airmen who had long worried about bailing out of high-speed aircraft. But A.A.F. designers could not claim complete credit. The idea had been copied from a similar Luftwaffe gadget...
...Lafe Parks stuck to his school, hobbling out from the hospital on crutches to quell a mutiny of the dozen students, who wanted their money back. Persuasive Parks, a better talker than he had been a pilot, talked them...
...British Way. Hession, prewar R.A.F. pilot, got his "blue" in swimming at Cambridge, was the youngest vicar in the Church of England when he assumed his duties in 1936. He has had a hand in many a British religious film, has shown some of them in his church...
Structural Test. During tests of the airplane's structural strength, the radio equipment especially shines. Designers like to know how much extra strain an airplane will take. Formerly, they sent a human pilot aloft with instructions to test the plane for the most extreme strains it would get in combat or commercial service. Often, especially in spin tests or pullouts from high-speed dives, something broke or failed to work. Even if the pilot parachuted to safety, neither he nor the plane's smashed instruments could tell the full story of just what happened at the climax...