Word: runway
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Connie dashed down the runway with her engines in full cry, dropped her bellow to a mutter, stopped, turned around again. Smoke plumed from one of her engine nacelles. But fire there meant less danger than it had meant in older ships. In each fireproof engine housing were 16 thermostatic fire warnings and an extinguishing system to put carbon dioxide just where it was needed. The blaze, from a backfire, died...
...hedgehop across tea plantations to escape into the mountains. Another P-40 pilot, unable to take off, sat in his cockpit until a Zero set his plane afire and forced him to run for it. Two American Negro workers mounted a machine gun without cover on a runway, blazed away furiously at the zooming Zeros...
...buckets, shot gazelles for meat and kept tinkering with the plane. Heavy rains began to fill the river. The mechanics hitched a rope to the plane's nose and got natives to tug it up the bank. A month after the accident the plane roared down a makeshift runway and took off, leaving natives agog...
...strapped down to his seat with a parachute and a safety belt and had to climb out of the upside-down cockpit eight feet under water. And as if that wasn't enough for one day, the plane that brought him back to Guadalcanal skidded off the runway and piled up in the coral-crusty...
...Guadalcanal U.S. air power has been a shoestring magnificence. U.S. planes operate from a runway built by the Japs. The planes are maintained by mechanics who work blacked out under ponchos with flashlights. The pilots go out on two or three missions a day. They sleep out a chunk of each night in foxholes. They never complain. And they always win. So far U.S. pilots have shot down more than 400 Jap planes. In August 1940, when the Battle of Britain was at its height, the R.A.F. shot down 1,091 German planes-but they were meeting hundreds of planes...