Word: preflight
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Hint of Trouble. Some of the minor annoyances of earlier flights were missing aboard Apollo 10. None of the crew caught cold, probably because of a less tiring preflight schedule. None suffered nausea caused by weightlessness, possibly because of in-flight head-movement exercises prescribed by the astronauts' physician, Dr. Charles Berry. For the first time since John Young smuggled a corned-beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3 flight in 1965 and littered the spacecraft interior with crumbs, the astronauts were allowed a supply of bread. To withstand the pure-oxygen atmosphere, which quickly dries bread and makes...
...need for myth as the superstitions created by "rational" technology itself. Hardly anyone is more superstitious these days than the supposedly no-nonsense men who fly huge jetliners at multimile altitudes. Aviators frequently cross unused seat belts prior to takeoff, or spit on a wheel after their preflight inspection-thus indulging the old belief that saliva is an offering of the spirit to the gods. Some auto racers don't like peanuts or women in their pits. In keeping with the belief that new machines cause sterility, U.S. servicemen blithely took sexual advantage of British girl radar operators...
After a detailed mission briefing and a long preflight check, we finally took off from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, leading a "cell" of three planes spaced two miles apart to avoid mid-air collisions. Three hours later, over the Philippines, the green-and-black camouflaged Stratoforts rendezvoused with three KC-135 jet tankers for a 40-minute ballet of mid-air refueling...
Wally Schirra, to be sure, had never succumbed to the growing pessimism. "If we had 999 chances out of 1,000 of having a successful flight," he explained, in a preflight interview for the National Broadcasting Company, "no one would want the 1,000th flight. But you don't add up a whole bunch of flights and say we're due for a failure. It's 999 out of 1,000 on each flight...
...other 70% are nearly all young volunteers fresh from high school and college, who become warrant officers* if they complete the flight course successfully. As new recruits, they take regular Army basic training for eight weeks and then go to Texas' Fort Wolters for four weeks of preflight instruction...