Word: runway
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...Boeing's plant at Renton, Wash, last week for its first secret test flight. Elliott Merrill, Boeing's crack test pilot, revved up the plane's four 2,200-h.p. motors till the earth trembled. Then the 130,000-lb. plane skimmed along the runway, lifted easily into the air. An hour later Pilot Merrill grinned: "She handles easier than...
...Army Air Forces thought it had the last word in quick surfacing for airfield runways when its engineers developed perforated steel mats. They have been installed on battlefronts all over the world, proved serviceable under almost all conditions. But their cost was terrific: a 5,000-by-150-ft. runway required 1,150 airplane (C-47) loads of steel, 6,000 man-hours of labor...
Last week Air Forces engineers were glad to announce that they had a new emergency runway material with the essential advantages of steel mats. Known officially as PBS (Prefabricated Bituminous Surface), it consists of a layer of cloth between two layers of tar-soaked paper. It can be carried in one-tenth the airplane space and laid, by machine, almost twice as fast. Spread over a rolled earth surface, the durable, water-repellent covering sustains the heat and shock of landings with little damage, bogs down only when subsurface moisture is extreme...
...morning sun was lacquering the China sky a brilliant red when the B-29 Superfortress Monsoon roared down the long runway. It seemed she would never get off. When the heavy-laden monster finally rose, the crew opened the hatch, only to see the ground still hugging them. Said a crewman, closing the hatch: "Maybe if we don't look it'll go away...
...swift interplay of forces began when the plane bringing Henry Wallace back from Chungking touched the runway at Fairbanks, Alaska. Roly-poly Samuel Rosenman, the President's speechwriter and confidant, who is now filling much of Harry Hopkins' old role, was already burning the long-distance wires. He wanted, he said, to see Henry first. But Henry Wallace refused to say anything until he had talked to Franklin Roosevelt...