Word: pilotless
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Last week the Navy announced that its gunners would soon have a target worthy of their fire: the Martin KDM-1, a pilotless plane powered with a ramjet engine, designed to fly close to the speed of sound. The little drone is carried into the air under the wing of a larger airplane and flown fast enough to start its ramjet. Then it is released and flies thenceforth under remote control, while the Navy gunners try to shoot it down. When its fuel is gone, the drone zooms high in the air. A parachute opens and it floats down...
...request for a 3,000-mile range was proof that the missile men had some hope of solving problems that were regarded a few years ago as Buck Rogerish dreams. A guided missile is no mere pilotless bomber shepherded by a nearby mother plane. According to M.I.T.'s Dr. Karl T. Compton, new chairman of the Research and Development Board, a missile must fly near its target unaccompanied and have some sort of "seeing eye" to recognize the target and steer toward it. Admittedly, this is a large order...
Gable has one strong scene in which he "talks down" a navigator who is trying to land a pilotless bomber. Significantly, this is the movie's one big outdoor sequence. Back inside headquarters, where drama depends on the reading of lines, Cinemactor Gable cannot always hold the center of the stage...
...Bomb Progress. If they are not yet as far advanced as they might wish in the manufacture of A-bombs, the Russians are well ahead in the field of V-bombs. They have concentrated particularly on very long-range attack by such self-propelled, pilotless aerial weapons, and it is reported that particularly satisfactory results have been obtained at an experimental station in Siberia near the Kamchatka peninsula. Over distances of 900 and 1,300 miles, they can now concentrate their aim within three to six miles of the target...
...understanding that he would fly it no faster than 82% of the speed of sound unless he was convinced that it would safely go faster. Approximately 20 more preliminary flights are planned between now and next summer; Goodlin has the privilege of recommending that the XS-1 be flown pilotless by radio control in its supersonic test. But last week, after months of devouring engineering and wind-tunnel reports, and after handling the plane under power, he said: "I know what this airplane can do. I think it will fly a thousand miles an hour and I think...