Word: planes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Shortly after midnight, 76 sweltering Puerto Ricans and five crew members jammed into a reconverted war-surplus Curtiss Commando twin-engined plane at San Juan, P.R. The first passengers aboard grabbed the leatherette bus seats in the middle aisle. The late ones squeezed into bucket seats along the walls. Five infants snuggled in their parents' laps. Pilot Alfred O. Cockrill of Pittsfield, Mass., late of the Naval Air Transport service, took off, headed northwest for Miami, on the way to New York...
...plane had barely cleared San Juan Bay when the right engine, pounding for altitude, sputtered and conked out. There was no chance to get back to the field; Pilot Cockrill made the best of his only choice. He set the plane down on its belly into the mottled, moonlit sea, a mile from shore, 400 yards from a small island. The lights went out. In the black horror of the cabin many of the Puerto Ricans, chained to their seats by terror, just prayed and waited...
Life jackets were dropped, lost or thrown aside in the crush and panic. Some passengers could not swim, others cringed inside the cabin in fear of the shark-infested sea. In six minutes the plane sank. A few survivors, who had scrambled out, reached the island. Others floated in the water until Coast Guard boats, guided by the eerie swaying light of plane-dropped flares, picked them up. Of the 81 aboard, 53 were lost, including Pilot Cockrill and the five infants, all but three of the 20 women...
...just after taking off from Florianópolis, plane 2023, a Brazilian air force C-47 of the Correio Aereo Nacional, radioed back that it had run into heavy overcast, was going on instruments. Aboard were 13 servicemen, nine civilians including four women and two children, a crew of six. Plane 2023 was on a routine flight to Porto Alegre and then to Uruguaiana in the neighboring state of Rio Grande...
...after the government had said that Lechin could come back "when things return to normal," most of Bolivia was working again. Even the miners had begun to go back to the pits. The only important exceptions were U.S. and other foreign mine managers, who had been evacuated by plane after the fighting stopped. Many of them refused to return to their posts, leaving Bolivia short of the know-how needed...