Word: squadronal
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...airmen flying the far north in search of weather data have often been bedeviled and bewildered by the arctic twilight. During the long arctic winter, the navigators of the 375th Squadron, at Eielson Airforce Base near Fairbanks, Alaska, had no trouble. They used special "grid" maps* and flew by the stars, visible all the time. During the arctic summer, they flew by the never-setting...
...fall, both the sun and the stars often failed them. The sun remained invisible below the horizon for many hours each day, but it gave enough light to blot out the stars. When a weather-watching B-29 started out for the North Pole, a standard mission for Squadron 375, it had to take off during a particular 15-minute period in each 24 hours. If it flew at any other time, it could not get to the pole and back without having to pass through a broad belt of blinding twilight...
Last week Squadron 375 was sure it had the twilight problem pretty nearly licked. One gadget it has found useful is the Pfund† sky compass which polarizes light reflected from the sky-and points to the spot on the horizon directly above the invisible sun. When used with the proper tables, the sky compass gives the direction in which the plane is flying...
Since 1884, the Roman Catholic Church has formally disapproved cremation. Many Hebrews also frown on it, though Sir Philip Sassoon of the great Jewish banking family had a bomber squadron scatter his ashes. The Church of England sanctioned ash-scattering in 1944, if disposal were on consecrated ground. No Britain of top prominence has yet availed himself of the method. Although the last two Archbishops of Canterbury were cremated, as was Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, none asked that his ashes be scattered. (But South Africa's Jan Christian Smuts had his ashes scattered on a hill at his farm...
...first carriers built as such were the old Lexington and Saratoga* Radford got duty on the Sara in 1929, within a year was skipper of the carrier's Fighting Squadron One. This outfit became known as the High Hat Squadron, and astounded the country with virtuoso exhibitions of precision acrobatics. Radford was a superbly confident and skillful pilot by that time, but he was more than a mere stunter. He was interested in precision flying, precision machines, precision methods of making...