Word: ruddering
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Carved into the memory of every combat pilot are moments of total recall-the unforgettable glimpses of a foeman starting to smoke, the inescapable sounds of the typewriter-tapping of tracer on fuselage and rudder. Captain Heinz Knoke, winner of Nazi Germany's coveted Rit-terkreuz and the youngest squadron commander in the Luftwaffe, pinpoints his most vivid memory high above Helgoland, one July day in 1943. In I Flew for the Führer, Knoke tells how his Messerschmitt squadron loaded up with 500-lb. fragmentation bombs and climbed high above a formation of U.S. Flying Fortresses...
...were at an altitude of 5,000 to 6,000 feet, and I reduced the power-setting so that we were flying at 120 m.p.h. He asked, why so slow, and pushed at the throttles. I told him to be more economical on the gas. I kicked the rudder and started into a turn, but he noticed. He was wearing a wrist compass. He said that if I went back to the Philippines he would kill me. He held that gun cocked every minute, with his finger on the trigger...
...rudder at the third, the elevators at the fourth. Last week, searching through the wreckage of the Globemaster at Moses Lake, Wash., in which 87 servicemen died (TIME, Dec. 29), investigators found its locking panel-and the plain cause of the crash. The knob hadn't been pushed past the second notch...
...only possible to conclude that the crash was the result of tragic negligence on the part of the pilot. He had gone down the runway with rudder and elevators still locked up. The plane took off. and went into a steep climb. In the minute after it was airborne, probably the pilot tried to get the nose down, found to his horror that the controls were rigid, perhaps even grabbed for the knob at his right knee. But by then the Globemaster had stalled, had crashed and was being hammered into blazing wreckage on the hard desert floor...
...admirals, completely absolving the Wasp's Captain Burnham C. McCaffree of all fault. They advanced three theories to explain Tierney's disastrous maneuver: 1) he had become "completely confused," and thought that a sharp left turn would bring him to his correct position; 2) he ordered "left rudder" when he meant to say "right rudder"; 3) he thought he was on the blacked-out Wasp's right bow when actually he was on her left...