Word: radars
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Catalyst with Resilience. Having just weathered the toughest science brushup course of all time, Teacher Conant should be in good form. As chairman of the National Defense Research Committee he exercised absolute dictatorial powers over men and materials in its $2 billion wartime research program, developing radar, antiradar, various new chemical warfare wrinkles-and nuclear fission. Conant's job was as an organizer, moderator and catalyst, but he would have failed if he had not been a topnotch scientist...
Scientists are also busy on defense. The Army has a smallish rocket called GAPA (Ground to Air Pilotless Aircraft) "believed capable of seeking out and destroying enemy weapons." Fired in salvos toward V2s picked up by radar, GAPA and its successors might "home" on them by magnetic attraction or heat radiation and destroy them high...
...operators sit at ease, watching the airplane by eye and radar. A signal puts it into a dive or spin. Down it screams. Shock waves buffet its wings, claw at its tail surfaces. If anything cracks, a flashing light on the television screen tells what part has yielded. No life is lost, and every detail of the plane's experience, up to the final smash if it comes, is accurately recorded...
...A.A.F.'s Pinecastle Field, near Orlando, Fla., where afternoon thunderheads are a daily midsummer occurrence, five Black Widow planes take off each day to fly in the hazardous clouds. Guided by a radar control station called Ivy, and attended by a host of balloon-borne instruments, they measure air turbulence, the velocity of up-and downdrafts, temperature, pressure, humidity, 'cloud heights, the size of ice particles. Though no planes have been lost, they have taken a fearful buffeting; one pilot, whose instruments were knocked out by lightning, found when he fought his way out of the storm that...
...commercial aviation; 2) airlines' management. Personnel policies are antiquated, pay is low and big-business methods are virtually unknown. Some executives believe that bigger, faster planes will solve things, forgetting that they will only cause bigger problems at obsolete airports. Rather than use the partial benefits of radar in its present form, the industry is holding out for an all-purpose system, which is at least five years away...