Word: tankers
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High Harpoon. When a tanker flies alongside a "receiver" (the plane to be refueled), the receiver lets out a slender line that floats behind in a graceful dropping curve. The tanker fires a kind of harpoon-gun, which shoots another line to tangle with the receiver's line. Clawlike devices on the two ends lock together. The receiver hauls in both lines. Next comes a fuel pipe filled with nitrogen gas to minimize danger of explosion. Then comes gasoline, flowing by gravity at 100 gallons a minute. The tanker can supply up to 2,000 gallons...
After this dragonfly mating, the hose is flushed out with nitrogen and hauled back to the tanker. The contact lines part at a special "weak link" and are hauled...
Most of the merchant ships knocked together during the war (e.g., Liberty ships) are uneconomical, so the committee asked for the construction of a new fleet of highspeed dry cargo and tanker vessels. But it sensibly warned the U.S. against trying to hog world shipping. Said the committee: "Many maritime nations are far more dependent [for income] on shipping than is the United States. . . . Any attempt on the part of the United States to monopolize a large part of world shipping . . . could constitute a threat to world peace," by further impoverishing some nations and drying up world trade...
...heroes of those awful hours in the plane were nine U.S. merchant seamen, homeward bound after delivering a tanker to an English buyer. They nonchalantly ate sardines and crackers, reassured the passengers and tied bibs made of torn sheets around the necks of retching men & women...
...projected 1,030-mile pipeline from the Abqaiq field in Saudi Arabia through Trans-Jordan, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean port of Sidon (TIME, March 24). When completed by 1949, the 30-to-31-inch line - world's biggest - will eliminate the present 3,650-mile tanker haul from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. Trans-Arabian, affiliate of the Arabian-American Oil Co., will spend $125 million on construction, expects that the line will initially carry some 300,000 barrels of crude...