Word: updrafts
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Immoderate Disasters. At 9, the fire storm rushed down the mountain, not feeding on brush but moving almost preternaturally five feet off the ground and stretching 40 feet in the air. At the crest above Greene's house it took on new oxygen from the valley's updraft. Truck Driver Andrew Board, whose house just down the road was almost miraculously spared, recalls: "It came with a great rumbling, deafening roar. I never knew they roared like that." Riding hot, dry winds of up to 70 m.p.h., the fire blasted down on Greene's $70,000 house...
...Pilots must feel their way in for landings with a ceiling of less than 100 ft.-even though Air Force standards call for a minimum of 300 ft. In addition to the mist, they must make their letdown through turbulent air and a tail wind, cope with a sudden updraft before touchdown and land on a runway that tilts crazily uphill...
...tactic.Since the task force's troops are always based at sea rather than in shore installations, security can be complete-and so can the surprise of the stab. Near Danang, the marines were using a new device to smoke the V.C. out: portable smoke generators to spot the updraft from concealed tunnel entrances...
...them aloft. But in 1921, gliding down a slope in the Rhon Mountains, a German airman noticed a flock of storks suddenly shooting upward more than 1,200 ft. without so much as flapping a wing. He turned toward the birds-and found himself wafted higher in a thermal updraft, a chute of warm air that rises in an invisible column from the earth's surface...
...abrupt 35° for take-off speeds up to 60 m.p.h.. and the ambulance at the end of the landing run seems so far away that it might be a Tootsie Toy. Once a jumper starts, there is no turning back: a wobbly takeoff, a sudden updraft. a slight miscalculation can mean a bone-shattering spill -and many a star of this perilous sport admits to frequent tussles with panic...