Word: tails
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Late in the war, two B-17 bombers collided over Belgium at 13,500 ft., and one of them was sheared in two. From the main section, one crewman succeeded in bailing out, but the rest crashed to their deaths. In the tail, Joe Frank Jones Jr., a 19-year-old gunner, tried to get out the escape hatch, found it jammed. He tried the window, but it was too small. He was trapped inside the plunging fragment. When Belgian peasants found him lying in a field, still alive, they took him to a hospital. There he lay unconscious...
...clues were thought to be contained in two small bright orange metal boxes, commonly called "black boxes." One records the voices of the plane's crew; the other collects data about flight conditions. Both boxes are located behind a ceiling panel just forward of the Boeing 747's tail. Although the boxes are designed to survive fires, crashes and immersion in salt water, the problem facing searchers was immense: Flight 182's recorders were in the plane's wreckage more than a mile below the ocean surface, deeper than any human diver...
...models raised questions for the project's paleontological team, headed by University of Texas at Austin Professor Wann Langston. MacCready's engineers wanted to know how the animal moved and how far forward it could swing its wings. Did it have webbed feet? (Answer: no.) Did it have a tail? (No.) Could its head have been shaped differently from what was previously thought? (Unresolved: only a few fragments of the skull have been recovered.) Each question sent the paleontologists back to examine the fossilized remnants of the giant pterosaur, which were discovered in 1971 scattered over a half-acre...
...pterosaur's lack of a tail posed another serious challenge to the engineers; a movable, horizontal tail surface increases the stability and control over pitch (the nose angle, up or down) of a flying object. But MacCready observed that other flying creatures, like the albatross, achieve stability and pitch control by instinctively making small fore and aft movements with their wings. His solution: the latter-day pterosaur will have an onboard computerized autopilot that will effect similar corrections in the attitude of its mechanical wings. That will take some doing. Explains MacCready: "Nature's creatures are very good at active...
...wanted to play, and I became a member of his team. I knew that if I could handle measuring the yield, that I'd be going overseas. So did Luis. We knew too that we would get to fly on missions. We'd be as important as a tail gunner, even one who never fired a shot...