Word: updraft
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...sailplane enthusiast, the best things in life are a cramped cockpit, a long slender wing, a stout updraft, and unending miles of sky. Given these things, plus ice to suck and fruit to munch, he will soar hawklike for hours on invisible fountains of air, wrapped in a silence so absolute that he can hear the faint whistle of a train passing below. Last week, in the 28th annual national soaring championships at Wichita's municipal airport, the pick of the U.S.'s 2,500 sailplane pilots were living the good life high above the Kansas plains...
...wrinkle: kits from which amateurs can design and assemble their own mobiles ($7.50, MobiProducts, Bloomington, Ind.). Experts' advice to automobilists: models that are balanced too carefully will not move easily; a good mobile should sway in the updraft from any mild cocktail party argument or even the softest gurgle from the crib...
...steep angle, Pierre was drawn aloft. He let loose the cable when the Air 102 had climbed hundreds of feet above the field. Skillfully flitting from updraft to updraft, he zigzagged and roller-coastered around the triangle. He sewed up the grand championship for himself by whooshing the distance at an average speed of 35.8 m.p.h., a French record for his class of glider. Unable to speak German, Pierre grinned his gratitude on being awarded the top trophy. "Pierre is an excellent and very clever flyer," said Germany's Runner-Up Ernst Haase. Then he added thoughtfully...
...Mount Rainier, fourth highest peak in the continental U.S. A friend in another private plane flew alongside just to keep an eye on him. Hodgkin's tiny plane toiled upward. About 400 ft. from the summit Hodgkin cut the gun, headed downhill into the shrieking updraft and settled in to a neat landing on a shallow slope. "It was easy," he said later. "But when I tried to start the engine, it wouldn't catch. Was I embarrassed...
...American know-how in backward areas. The audience sat fascinated as he told how the corporation saved Brazil $100 million a year by spraying coffee plantations with an insecticide, killing an African pest called broca. With obvious pride in American resourcefulness, he gleefully described how the updraft caused by the helicopter presses the chemical against the underside of the infested leaves,"precisely where it is needed...