Word: radars
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Pacific Wave. Hurricane Carol, which smashed, tangled and flooded New England last week, started her career as a run-of-the-mill hurricane, perhaps a little lazier than most. On Monday morning, she was dawdling along off South Carolina, watched by airplanes and Weather Bureau radar and spinning northward at only four miles per hour. By Monday afternoon, Carol was captured by the planetary wind. It picked up her whirling mass and carried it north northeastward at 18 to 20 m.p.h. The weathermen, studying their charts, expected her to veer more sharply to the east and pass harmlessly east...
Last week United Air Lines announced that it had tested a microwave radar, found it the best yet for commercial planes. Company engineers installed "C-band" (5.5 cm.) radar in a DC-3 (dubbed ' Sir Echo"). Unlike lower and higher frequency radar, the C-band radar scanned both a storm and the weather on the other side, enabled the pilot to spot and follow the path of least turbulence through the storm, or to detour conveniently if his route was clearly blocked. One important safety feature: the pilot, watching his scope, could see not only storms but the mountains...
...detect approaching enemy bombers, the U.S. has spread a web of radar stations along its coastlines and across the wastes of northern Canada and Alaska. Except for Navy picket ships and patrolling "Pregnant Geese" (radar-laden Lockheed Super Constellations), the protective net stops at the water's edge, leaving U.S. port cities vulnerable to sneak atomic attack. Last week the Air Force revealed that it plans to eliminate part of the gap with a string of artificial, radar-equipped Atlantic "islands," located from Newfoundland to the Virginia capes (see map) and as far as 150 miles offshore...
Sitting snug above the sea, each island will be a self-contained $1,000,000 platform for a radar tower and a mass of sensitive electronic gear. Unlike similar outposts built by the British in World War II, the unarmed Air Force stations will seek only to locate, rather than destroy, enemy aircraft; they will also guide friendly fighters to the target, furnish weather information to ships and shore. For the 30-odd technicians assigned to each island, living will be cramped and bleak indeed; the Air Force plans to rotate its seagoing units every 30 days...
...exact location announced. But survey ships are already at sea, taking samples of the ocean bottom to determine the firmest anchorages for the new stations. By next spring, construction will be under way. Air Force target date for completion of the entire chain: 1957. Total estimated cost (excluding radar equipment): $15 to $20 million...