Word: planes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Robert Doyle on hand, but the LIFE photographer-reporter team of Jack Birns and Roy Rowan, who had scored a beat with their eyewitness report of Mukden's last hours, were in Shanghai. The General agreed to a next morning departure. Birns and Rowan boarded a civilian cargo plane at Shanghai, but a ground haze delayed the landing at Nanking until 10 a.m., almost three hours after General Chou's transport plane was to leave for the Suchow battlefront. Gruin spent the interval conning the Chinese airmen into waiting for the overdue plane. At length, the TIME-LIFE...
...darkness before dawn things began to go wrong. On the flight engineer's board, instrument needles flickered away from their reassuring positions. An outboard engine began to lose oil; it flowed back over the wing like blood in the moonlight. The plane began to shudder; the far starboard engine died. Its feathered prop stood stark and motionless. The plane rumbled on uneasily, unevenly. The other starboard engine sputtered and died, and the craft began to lose altitude. Up forward, the radio operator methodically clicked out an SOS, giving his position. The white-faced passengers cinched themselves into life jackets...
...open hatch of one plane, a man climbing up the ladder was blocked by another soldier. They wrestled at the hatch, lost their footing and thumped heavily to the ground. A C.N.A.C. ground crewman, a tall youngster in a black cap, screamed at the soldiers: "Stop! Stop! You are mad!" An angry red crawled up the taut vocal cords in his neck. "You are a disgrace, a disgrace to China!" Heedless, the soldiers stepped over their comrades still pummeling each other on the ground and jammed into the plane...
After MacWilliams' rice load had been shoved out on to the ground, supply troops and a group of Chinese army wives began clambering aboard his plane. The manifest for this trip listed a load of 36 pieces of baggage and 36 soldiers. Forcing his way into the packed cabin, he counted 126 crates, bundles and gunnysacks, and 69 people. MacWilliams shouted for the commanding officer and forced him to toss off half the luggage and cut the number of people to 50. "I'm still 5,000 pounds over," he said as he gunned his engines...
...Yangtze Valley rice paddies toward Shanghai. Flicking on the automatic pilot, he leaned back and hung one leg over the arm of his pilot's seat. "One thing you learn fast out here," he said, "and that's how to relax. You just have to put the plane up there, snap on the auto pilot and sit back. It's the only way we can fly as much as we do." In a single year MacWilliams had piled up more than 1,800 hours flying time, more than 150 a month. "They pay well," he said...