Word: pilots
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...home. There's no indication how long it took Deacon Blues - if that is his real name - to create the game, but he does have one thing right: "The snakes are always released at the midpoint of a trans-oceanic flight. This is a necessary rule, as otherwise the pilot could just land the plane and get rid of the snakes." Genius, pure genius...
DIED. Scott Crossfield, 84, civilian aircraft designer and cold war test pilot who in 1953 became the first man to fly at Mach 2, twice the speed of sound--a record that spurred his rival, U.S. Air Force ace Chuck Yeager, to surpass it a month later; in a crash of Crossfield's single-engine Cessna in the mountains north of Atlanta. One of the post--World War II supersonic-jet aviators whom author Tom Wolfe said had "the right stuff," Crossfield dismissed the macho image of his field, saying that for most pilots he knew, the "main interest outside...
...California's Edwards Air Force Base, slim, hawk-nosed Test Pilot Scott Crossfield, 37, leisurely finished a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, struggled into a silver-tinted pressure suit that had been tailored to a skintight fit by a girdle manufacturer. Minutes later, Crossfield strapped himself into the cramped cockpit of a needle-nosed, stub-winged plane that was locked into place beneath the right wing of an Air Force B-52 bomber. At 8 o'clock sharp the B-52 roared down the runway and lifted. It carried with it Scott Crossfield in the X-15 rocket-plane ? designed...
...tense moment arrived. In the B-52, Pilot Charles C. Bock checked his air speed (450 knots), asked Scott Crossfield on the intercom if he was set. The reply: "I'm ready when you are, buddy." Bock went through a five-second countdown, then punched a red button on his control panel. With a metallic click a locking device opened, and the X-15 dropped silently on a long, fast, powerless glide toward the desert floor...
...hurtled toward the dry bed of Rogers Lake, a natural twelve-mile-long runway. Air Force and North American officials crowded anxiously around loudspeakers relaying Crossfield's radio messages. At 14,000 ft., Scott Crossfield, a World War II Navy pilot and a test pilot for a decade, remarked laconically: "I wish I could do a roll on my way in." (Later he explained that he had restrained himself because "if I'd goofed, it would have looked kind of sour.") Testing his controls with a wide, lazy-S turn, Crossfield, following procedure, jettisoned the X-15's ventral tailfin...