Word: pilotless
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...have to be very bright to know that the planes of World War II are already obsolete, were busy promoting a grand-scale Air Engineering Development Center for studying and testing the air weapons of tomorrow. They talked Buck Rogers language. Some topics: supersonic aircraft-piloted and pilotless-planes and rockets powered by nuclear energy, space ships, space bases that would float above the atmosphere, where gravity's pull is weak as a kitten's. An old-line pilot might just as well hang up his goggles and retire...
Beyond television broadcasting, the new tube has fascinating possibilities. Some are military. Perched in the nose of a pilotless bomber, the tube could watch the terrain below, projecting what it sees on a screen in a guiding airplane many miles behind. By watching the screen, an operator who remains in faraway safety could steer the bomber cross-country by remote control...
This little aircraft is a captured Japanese suicide rocket bomb, fitted with a pilot's cockpit, steering controls and an explosive warhead in the nose. It may have been modeled after the pilotless German V-i robomb, which it resembles in size and destructive capacity. Japanese broadcasts have glorified it under the name Jinrai ("sudden peal of thunder"), but U.S. fighting men promptly tagged it with another Japanese term, baka ("stupid"). In operation, Stupid is carried near its target by a bomber, then cut loose. The pilot glides down and can fire three rockets in the tail to give...
Weather did not halt the German ersatz air force of pilotless V-bombs, and by last week Allied commanders were willing to concede that the V-bombs had true military value when coupled with an offensive. The Germans fired salvos of V15 and V-25, and a shorter-ranged, smaller version of V-2 as they would have used heavy artillery in advance of an assault. Their effectiveness was obvious: even haphazard strikes could do military damage aplenty in junction towns crowded with men and materials. The enemy claimed to have poured them on Antwerp, Brussels...
Does all this add up to postwar pilotless cargo planes, shooting through the stratosphere at inhuman speeds and heights? The engineers who have developed the automatic devices think not. They believe that for some time to come it will be necessary for a pilot, to go along to correct the machines' mistakes or inadequacies. But the pilot will not have much else...