Word: tails
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...tried to handcrank his engine for a takeoff, the inertial starter clutch failed. "There I was," he says, "drifting to Honolulu. I cranked myself to exhaustion." After long minutes of finger drumming, Quesada suddenly recalled an old aviator's superstition. He went back and urinated on the tail. Naturally, the engine started up with the next turn of the crank...
...indicated that the Soviets fired at maximum range), a capsulelike object was detached from the nose cone and dipped into the ocean. Both hit near the middle of a triangle of three Soviet ships, each three to five miles apart. Red sailors fished out the instrument-crammed capsule, turned tail for Soviet ports...
...conventional rocket engine, fuel is burned in a roughly spherical combustion chamber, and turns into hot, high-pressure gas. To keep the gas from expanding wastefully in all directions as it leaves the nozzle, it is channeled into a tail cone where its pressure is efficiently converted into thrust as it expands (see diagram). The cone should be long enough to reduce the pressure of the gas to that of the surrounding atmosphere. Thus rockets intended to work at very high altitudes must have extra-long tail cones...
General Electric, Aerojet-General, Pratt & Whitney and Rocketdyne are all working on plug nozzles. Tests have been promising, and rocket men predict that for many applications the plugs will eventually supersede the graceful tail-cone engine...
...left landing gear collapsed, flipped over and burst into flames. Dead: 37, burned alive hanging upside down in their seat belts or struggling to get out. Safe: four crewmen who scrambled out of the pilots' compartment, four passengers and a stewardess who made it out of the tail...