Word: take-off
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...blustery February morning in 1953, a B-29 took off from Massachusetts' Bedford airport and pointed its nose along the great-circle route to Los Angeles. There were eight people aboard the big bomber, but after take-off no one worked the controls. For two hours, a pilot sat watching the instruments. Then he got bored and let the plane fly itself. It did, making minor corrections for each gust of air. It rose to 21,000 ft. to traverse the Rockies, stayed on course through a 100-m.p.h. wind shift over Nevada. Finally, 13 hours...
...long-term dream of airplane designers, the jet-powered vertical take-off plane, became an official reality last week. The Air Force announced that Ryan Aeronautical Co. has test-flown successfully its jet X-13 VTOL (vertical take-off and landing), putting it through all its paces after 18 months of partial tests...
Coming back to his take-off point at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert, he pulled up the nose of the X-13 until it was hovering noisily like a rotor-less helicopter. Then he descended under the framework and maneuvered the batlike plane into take-off position. After two such demonstrations, the X-13 was tipped onto its belly and wheeled into the hangar like any other jet plane...
...addition, Lockheed expects its seat to work well during dangerous low-altitude emergencies when the capsule would not have time or space to work. "With our D seat," says C. L. ("Kelly") Johnson, Lockheed's vice president for engineering and research, "and at today's take-off and landing speeds, it becomes possible to eject pilots safely at near-zero altitudes-as low as 400 ft. at 850 m.p.h. This thing has the same wing-loading as an airplane. Crude as it looks, it's a very sound aerodynamic device...
...take-off for Paris, as Director Billy Wilder has filmed and cut it, is a striking piece of cinematic craftsmanship. One by one, like bricks in a rising wall the difficulties are stacked in front of the hero (James Stewart) and in the moviegoer's mind: bad weather, the sod runway almost ankle-deep in mud and spotted with potholes, high wires and high trees near the field's edge, engine running 30 revs too low, gas load at least a hundred gallons more than the plane has ever taken off with, pilot already worn from lack...