Word: runway
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This flight had seemed no different from any other. The huge Liberator thundered down the concrete runway. The nose lifted, and she gracefully soared a couple of hundred feet. She swung sidewards, on one wing, and onlookers thought it was a bank; but suddenly there was a roar...
Leaders taxied out on the dirt runway, then the wingmen and the rest, and soon the chain of planes rising over grain fields seemed endless...
...plane started up before we were sitting down. A young lieutenant, settled on the benches running fore & aft on both sides of the glider, checking parachutes, barely got out in time. He lit running as the big 15-man glider, suddenly an amazingly skittish, lightfooted creature, lifted off the runway. To a glider novice the take-off was startling; we were airborne and climbing on the rope while the heavier tow plane was still soaring down the runway, picking up speed for its own takeoff. We climbed rapidly to 700 feet, circled to get into formation...
...ground. Twenty-four Flying Fortresses had stood there: after the Japs had passed, "only five could be called airplanes any more . . . and none of them could fly. But. by pooling the five wrecks ... we could salvage in all ... three planes which might get into the air-when the runway was cleared...
Costs are a fraction (about 20%) of concrete construction. But the most spectacular saving is in time. Soil-cement enthusiasts boast (and deliver) "a runway in a week; an airport in a month...