Word: runway
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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There were many "Kriegies,"* former prisoners of war, bitterly unforgiving of the Germans. There were sick and wounded. There were 1,700 airmen in one day at Connecticut's windswept Bradley Field. One jubilant man jackknifed to kiss the good, solid U.S. runway (see cut). Most of them were pretty certain to be off to the wars again soon...
...bright, moonlit night when antiaircraft guns around Yontan airstrip in west central Okinawa burst into their barking din. A brisk enemy air raid was on. Suddenly, to the amazement of Marine pilots and mechanics, a Japanese twin-engined bomber, its wheels still retracted, glided in and scraped down the runway to a fairish belly landing. This was the debut of the Giretsu branch of Japan's fantastic suicide warriors...
Once started, the take-offs had to be run with stopwatch accuracy. At ten-second intervals the tow planes moved in from the sides, gently tautened the line, then poured on power and roared down the runway and off into the sky. By then the day had dawned clear and bright, with a near-perfect ten-mile wind...
...pilot aligns his plane on a radio signal beam from the field and steers his plane along it. In the new system, the radio signals themselves steer the ship; the pilot need not touch the controls. One instrument, the "localizer," guides the plane toward the middle of the runway; another, the "glide path," controls its descent. The instruments can pick up a plane 15 to 35 miles away at 3,000 feet altitude and glide it in to a perfect three-point landing...
...work went on. Flanders and his men restored a bomb-clogged deep-water well, installed a purification system, built gasoline storage plants. When a bluff stood in the path of one runway, they simply blasted it flat. In all, they reshaped over four million square yards of rock and coral...