Word: runway
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...difficult, sophisticated way to fly a jet plane off a short runway or no runway at all is to design it so it can stand on its tail like the Ryan Vertijet and zoom directly upward. The simple, brute-force way is to blast it into the air with rocket power. Last week the Air Force announced that the "zero-length" launch, done in the past with less advanced airplanes, has been accomplished with North American's supersonic F-100D fighter...
Only the junta, U.S. embassy officials and long lines of silent troops waited to see the Nixons off at the airport. At 5:09 p.m. the DC-6B flicked off the runway and turned north for Puerto Rico and U.S. soil. In Caracas the night before, Venezuela's Provisional President Rear Admiral Wolfgang Larrazabal, gloomily twirling a yellow pencil, had expressed his fervent regrets. "It is very sad," he murmured. "I shall never forget this thing all my life...
...Johnson had already made six trial flights into the 75,000-and 85,000-ft. altitudes. This time was for keeps; the flight would be measured officially both by the instrument package in the plane and by radar and theodolite cameras tracking it from the ground. Screaming down the runway, the Starfighter lifted off at 9:40 a.m.; Johnson headed westward toward Santa Barbara, climbing steeply. At 35,000 ft. he kicked in his afterburner, turned east, still climbing. He leveled off at 45,000 ft., poured straight ahead at about 1,000 m.p.h. As he reached the instrumented altitude...
Then came the letdown to the field. It was a few minutes past midnight-two hours since the trouble had begun-when Obie turned into his final approach. He was too high, too far to the left of the runway. "I didn't have time to think. The GCA station was telling me to go around. The tower told me to go around-everybody in the world told me to go around. I didn't say one word. I just kept coming in. I felt I had used every bit of energy I ever had. I didn...
Suddenly Obie saw two rows of lights. He banked sharply to the right, lined his plane up with the runway and with power on, poured straight for it. Firefighting crews, an ambulance, staff cars and red-blinking emergency trucks shrieked down the runway in pursuit. Obie neatly kissed his plane down. "I flew it into the ground. I wasn't strapped to the seat. I was just sitting. I never made a better landing in my life. I couldn't make a better one in a hundred thousand years." When the plane stopped, he jumped out. Shocked...