Word: pilotless
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Super Sabre, was followed by a violent explosion. A ten-year veteran of jet flying assigned to Okinawa's Kadena Air Force Base, Schmitt managed to head his crippled plane away from the densely populated city of Ishikawa (pop. 30,000) before he bailed out. But the pilotless ship suddenly veered, headed straight for the modem, U.S.-built Miyamori School, where 1,306 Okinawan children were having their morning milk break...
...parachuted to earth, reused time and again. "These little fellows have four obvious pluses for the field commander," says an Army droneman. "They require no take-off or landing strip; they are effective at night, when the enemy makes his important moves; they are easily recoverable; and they are pilotless -precious life is being preserved...
...more compact warheads and with better missiles such as the Atlas and Titan ICBMs, which travel at 16,000 m.p.h. coming along more rapidly than expected, the Navaho would probably be obsolete before it ever got into operational use. Instead, the Air Force decided to produce Northrop's pilotless Snark bomber, a much slower (650 m.p.h.) but more nearly operational missile, as an interim weapon until the huge ICBMs are in production...
Since that historic flight, kept secret until last week, Inertial Guidance-the gyroscopic navigational system that guided the B-29 without visual or electronic aid from earth or stars-has been an obvious choice to control the U.S.'s ultimate earth-to-earth weapon: the pilotless intercontinental ballistic missile (TIME, Jan. 30, 1956). Last week in Cambridge. Mass., a pudgy, square-faced engineer who presides over an aging red brick factory building (still labeled "Home of Whittemore Shoe Polishes," but listed on Massachusetts Institute of Technology records as the Instrumentation Laboratory) outlined the details of Inertial Guidance, just declassified...
...Bureau of Standards still lacks a grading system for it. In minute amounts, it will enable electronics men to make transistors with nearly twice the heat resistance (up to 300° F.) of previous transistors, and open up vast new possibilities for the guidance systems in supersonic planes and pilotless missiles. Says President John Erik Jonsson: "This is the purest product ever made...