Word: transport
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Also at Fort Belvoir, Army engineers are trying out the versatile Universal Engineer Tractor, which resembles a World War I tank, is mostly aluminum and weighs only 31,000 Ibs. The UET can be used as a bulldozer, grader, scraper, armored personnel carrier or general-purpose transport, has an over-the-road speed of better than 30 m.p.h. Some new items already in the engineers' toolbox: aluminum landing mats, plastic road surfaces (called "membranes"), and moisture-proof plastic maps that can be wadded up and tucked into a shirt pocket and still retain their original shape...
...Pentagon, nearly double the share of its nearest rival, General Dynamics. In the current year, Lockheed is certain to stay at the top of the list of suppliers, having already won two major prizes: a $1.3 billion Air Force contract to build the giant C-5A transport, the world's largest plane, and a development award likely to grow to another $1 billion for the Army's so-called Advanced Aerial Fire Support System, a combat plane combining a helicopter's lift with half the speed of a jet airliner. Aerospace has long since supplanted munitions...
...based in California, but its huge Georgia plant at Marietta, the size of 93 football fields, is so important to the state that Senator Richard Russell, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, felt that it would help his political future if Lockheed won the contract for the C-5A transport; after a visit to the White House, Russell exultantly leaked the news two days before it was supposed to become official. Lockheed's 22,000 Marietta employees celebrated with a spree of buying autos, appliances, houses and summer cottages...
...Lockheed, it all looked too good to be true-and it was. Saturn, a 16-passenger feeder transport, and the Constitution, a 168-passenger behemoth, proved to be expensive flops. After a disastrous crash, Washington grounded all Constellations, and order cancellations piled on top of rewiring costs. Though Lockheed eventually lost $35 million on commercial sales of the Connie, the plane returned to the air, set speed records for four-engine piston craft that may never be broken, and airlines still fly 455 Constellations in a day when anything that isn't a jet is considered a creep. Again...
...Flight of the Phoenix crashes a shuddery old two-engine transport into the Sahara, follows its crew's effort to construct from the wreckage a spit-and-bailing-wire one-engine plane to escape in, and reaches a peak of excitement when this kite struggles to take off with five men sprawled on its wings. Measured against the ordinary run of adventure epics, Phoenix is a bonanza...