Word: pilots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With verve, nerve and skill, British aviation last week backed its reputation for daring. On a little-used airstrip at Chalgrove Oxfordshire, Test Pilot John Stuart Fin ) Fifield volunteered to make the first live test of Martin-Baker Aircraft Co. s low-altitude ejection seat (TIME March 21 ). Tossing a pilot out of an airplane at high altitude is comparatively simple. There is plenty of time for the parachute to open. Doing it at low altitude, especially at ground level, is much more risky. The Martin-Baker system has controls that match its performance automatically to the altitude...
Fifield got into the rear seat of a Meteor jet plane. With another test pilot at the controls, the plane screamed down the strip and reached 157 m.p.h. Just before the wheels left the ground, Fifield pulled the release handle. The ejection seat shot into the air. Fifty feet up, he separated from the seat and kept rising. When he reached 80 ft., two small parachutes pulled a big parachute out of its pack. It opened just in time, landing Fifield gently. The whole sequence, from ejection to landing, took six seconds...
...Test Pilot Roland Falk had been kidded by the press when he claimed he could roll his Vulcan, a delta-wing bomber the size of a big airliner. Last week, although scheduled only to make a low pass over the field, he rolled the great bomber like a jet fighter. Said a U.S. Air Force colonel: "I've never seen such a thing in my life." Said Falk: "I dared not ask them to let me do it. They might have said...
...which cost scores of lives, is the factual backbone of ex-Newsman Joe Klaas's first novel. Like the book's hero Jim Weis, Seattle-born Author Klaas got into World War II in one of Britain's Eagle Squadrons as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot. After Pearl Harbor. Joe Klaas, like Hero Weis, was "sold" to the U.S. Army Air Force for $35,000.* Like Weis, he was shot down in Tunisia by Luftwaffe fighters, resold by an Arab to the Germans for $20, spent two years behind Nazi fences, and finally took part...
...characters' lives, Novelist Klaas uses the familiar time-machine or flashback technique. Wyoming Schoolteacher Fritz Heine is a home-loving navigator who has never really navigated; Bombardier Robert Montgomery (pleasantly plagued by his cinemactor name) is a Texan who winds up gladly admitting that a hot pilot known only as Thunderbird. "a guy with seven Air Medals, two D.F.C.s and a D.S.C., is no ordinary nigger." The book's only homegrown villain, Colonel Condon, was booted from West Point after his third year for cheating on a French exam, now nobly carries on by bartering stolen food...