Word: stratojet
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Dates: during 1949-1949
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With a pair of enormous binoculars dangling from his neck, President Harry Truman trotted around Maryland's Andrews Field last week to see what the Air Force was doing about the future. As awed as any other layman, he looked over Boeing's record-breaking B-47 Stratojet with General Ike Eisenhower, impishly poked his glasses into a C82 Flying Boxcar where photographers were waiting to snap his picture. Crawling out of the tailless YB-49 Flying Wing, the President commented crisply: "Think I'll buy it." (Nobody reminded him that the Air Force had canceled orders...
...whooshed by, skimming the ground, stunting singly and in tight formation. The spectacular eight-jet Flying Wing took off and zoomed upward, followed by the six-jet B-47, trailing clouds of smoke from 18 rocket units. In a race of bomber v. fighter the B-47 Stratojet walked away from the F-80, then was outrun by the swept-back F-86, which has already clocked a record 670.981 m.p.h. For a roaring finale the Air Force sent 16 huge, cigar-shaped B-36s lumbering overhead...
After hissing impatiently behind the scenes for 17 months, the Air Force's hottest jet bomber-the experimental Boeing XB-47 Stratojet-whipped into public view last week like a kerosene-burning skeet target. It left Moses Lake, Wash., with a whoosh of its six jet engines, skyrocketed 2,289 miles to Andrews Air Force Base, Md. (where it rolled down the runway with a fuchsia-colored parachute blossoming from its tail, to slow it down) in three hours and 46 minutes...
...next day the country had cause to blink again. A Northrop YB-49 eight-jet Flying Wing-a weird, batlike sky monster which is almost twice as heavy as the Stratojet-flew from Muroc, Calif, to Andrews Air Force Base in four hours and 25 minutes. Average for 2,259 miles: 511.2 miles an hour...