Word: runways
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...shaped, swept-wing Hawker P-1067 interceptor-fighter, powered by a Rolls-Royce turbojet and touted as the "fastest fighter in the world." To show what the P-1067 can do, Hawker's chief test pilot, Neville Duke, opened the throttle and snapped his plane low over the runway at 15 m.p.h. faster than the official world record (670 m.p.h.), held by the U.S.'s F-86 Sabre. The whip-cracking sound of its passage hit the crowd like an explosion and knocked a microphone out of an announcer's hand...
Russian pilots flew like Cossacks. They liked to toss off bottles of vodka, hurtle down the runway, take off simply by hauling up their wheels. In combat, Red flight leaders flew above and behind their men to make sure no one shied away. They were never the finely honed flyers Germany had for her Luftwaffe (the average life of a Stormovik pilot was seven missions), but there were always plenty to take the place of those who died...
Four men stood near a runway at Teheran's Mehrabad airport one day this week, waiting for the arrival of an American who was coming to try to work a miracle. At 11 o'clock, a U.S. Air Force Constellation landed. Out stepped W. Averell Harriman (see box) and his wife. The four men, antagonists in the great oil dispute which threatens Western Europe's oil and the world's peace, pressed forward to greet him: Iran's Foreign Minister Bagher Kazemi, representing a government hellbent on nationalizing oil; U.S. Ambassador Henry Grady...
Early one morning last week, 41-year-old Airman Blair jammed his 6 ft. 2 in. frame into the fighter's cockpit, gunned down the runway at Bardufoss, Norway, and headed north towards the Pole. Sealed off from tip to tip, his wings held 865 gallons of gas, enough for 5,000 miles. Soon the sea 22,000 feet below gave way to icy ridges and plateaus. A Norwegian Air Force Catalina flying boat patrolling near Spitzbergen gave him a radio call as he whisked past, reported back that Captain Blair was right on course. Hour after hour...
...Blair homed in on them, crossed Alaska's northern coastline just one minute off his schedule. He refueled near Fairbanks, roared east at 25,000 feet across Canada, munching a roast beef sandwich between gulps of oxygen. Nine hours later, he set his Mustang down on the runway at New York's Idlewild airport. He was the first man ever to fly solo across the hazardous North Pole route in a single-engined plane...