Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Nose-Heavy. Taking off with his afterburner bellowing full blast, Pilot Smith shot out over the Pacific and pointed his plane upward to test its rate of climb. He broke through cloud cover at 8,000 ft. At 35,000 ft. he approached the speed of sound, still climbing, and felt his ship get slightly nose-heavy. He tried to correct it but could not. Something had gone wrong with the plane...
...body. The stick would not budge, and the airplane's path steepened into a dive. Smith called the airport tower over his radio: "Lost hydraulic pressure. Controls frozen. Going straight in." By then his dive angle was almost vertical. A pilot in an F-100 saw him head toward the cloud deck. "Bail out!" he begged by radio. "Bail out, George...
Clap of Sound. As soon as he made his decision, he blew off the canopy-and an enormous sound, like the clap of a big gun, struck into the cockpit. It may have been this sound that has frozen many a pilot who has jettisoned his canopy and then ridden down to death. Perhaps it was a shock wave; no one is sure. But it frightened Pilot Smith as he had never been frightened. Terrified, he crouched forward (the wrong position for ejection). He does not even remember pressing the trigger that shot him out of the aircraft. The last...
...What Airplane?" On the sea, luck awaited him. A fishing boat commanded by Art Berkell, a former Navy rescue specialist, was within 100 yards, and a fleet of Coast Guard auxiliary craft was maneuvering near by. Berkell started toward Pilot Smith even before he hit the water, and had him out in 50 seconds. He was semiconscious, partly delirious. "Anyone else in the airplane?" asked Berkell. "What airplane?" replied Smith...
...Engineering reports on the case of Smith's airplane weigh 12 Ibs. The experts do not maintain that bailing out at more than the speed of sound is a safe procedure, but they are glad that at least one man has done it and lived. Now a pilot whose airplane heads for the deck in a screaming supersonic dive will know that he has a chance of survival...