Word: tailing
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...black plane with the high tail looked out of place among the shiny military jets crowding the U.S. Air Force base at Incirlik, near Adana, Turkey. Its wide wings drooped with delicate languor-like a squatting seagull, too spent to fly. Its pilot seemed equally odd: a dark, aloof young man who wore a regulation flying suit and helmet but no markings, and had a revolver on his hip. Pilot Francis Gary Powers, 30, climbed into the one-man cockpit, gunned the black ship's single engine, and as the plane climbed toward take-off speed, the wide wings...
Everything about the U-2 seemed tailored to obtain the last inch of range, the last moment of endurance. The thin straight wings were a model of aerodynamic cleanliness; the raked, razorlike tail added a minimum of drag. Even the landing gear was pared to the final ounce. Light bicycle-type main wheels were aided by wingtip wheels that were dropped immediately after takeoff. Between gliding and plain powered flight, Sekigawa guessed that the U-2 could stay aloft as long as nine hours on a single trip...
...frogmen returned to shore, paying out an insulated wire as they went. After a short countdown, an officer pressed a button, sent along the wire an electrical impulse that touched off a small, solid-propellant aircraft rocket in the model's tail. The model rose sedately out of the water, climbed to about 60 ft. and plopped down again. It all looked too easy to be true. Nothing but water was needed to hold the rocket upright, and only water was affected by its blast. Even if the rocket had carried 1,000,000 Ibs. of fuel...
After these broad strokes come successively finer, heavily italicized distinctions: the blue-gray gnatcatcher "looks like a miniature mockingbird. A very tiny, slender mite, even smaller than a chickadee, blue-gray above and whitish below . . . long, contrastingly colored tail." It migrates through the whole of Texas, winters in the southern part, breeds in the northern. The black-tailed gnatcatcher has "less white on tail." Among the robin's maculate cousins, "the reddish tail is the hermit thrush's mark." The deadpan statement, "red eye is of little aid," has nothing to do with liquor but refers...
Only fortnight ago Dr. J. Harold Burn of Oxford suggested that the lift usually associated with smoking may be caused by an adrenalin-related hormone called nore-pinephrine?the same hormone that raises the hair on the tail of a scared cat. But most scientists agree that smoking becomes a habit because of emotional compulsions rather than any physical need...