Word: runway
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Hunt. As each plane begins to roll down the runway, a vast, bright flame bursts from its tail. This is the afterburner: extra fuel dumped into the tail pipe to give extra power. The flame looks as big as the airplane, and it roars like continuous thunder. It shoots the plane forward and then upward as if a gigantic elevator were pulling it into the sky. As the plane rises almost vertically, the great flame shrinks to a small, bright point like a moving star. Then it blinks out suddenly; the fighter is at its search altitude, and the stealthy...
...dusty airport outside Detroit one February day in 1926, Henry Ford braced himself against a cutting wind, and lifted a sack of mail to a goggled pilot in an open-cockpit Stout monoplane. The engine roared, and the little 100-m.p.h. plane lurched down the runway and took off for Cleveland, 91 miles away. It was the first flight of airmail under the recently passed Kelly Act. To airmen, it was the beginning of commercial aviation in the U.S. Until then, the U.S. Army and a few private operators had flown the mail for the Post Office Department...
Afterward, one passenger remembered seeing "the fence coming" and hearing someone yell: "We're going to crash." Within seconds, the National Airlines DC-4 was skidding along the sleet-coated runway of Philadelphia's International Airport. It ran off the runway, through a ditch. Its landing gear disintegrated, flames shot from a ruptured fuel tank...
Finally Attlee's Boeing Stratocruiser set down gently on the runway. The door opened; Attlee plunged down the steps to give Harry Truman's hand a vigorous shake. Later that day, across a long table in the White House cabinet room, they began their crucial conferences...
Into the Night. At 9:30 that night, Veteran Pilot Jorge Guzmán taxied LAMSA's Flight 202 out to the end of the runway and revved up his engines for the nonstop flight to Mexico City, 430 mountain-studded miles to the southeast. Guzmán tested his flaps and rudder, then gave his DC-3 the gun and soared up into the chill, starry night. At 12,000 feet he seemed to feel something wrong. "It didn't feel like anything serious," he later explained, "but there was a vibration somewhere in the back...