Word: wingtips
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Barely airborne, it lurched. Its right wingtip dropped, scraped the runway. The plane veered crazily, crashed through a hangar with a shattering roar, and burst into flame. Inside its crumpled fuselage, students (some of whose safety belts snapped) crawled dazedly amid bright fire, or lay still. Sixteen managed to tumble out into the arms of hangar crewmen...
...searching B-17 plane spotted the crashed C-47, circled low. Then a wingtip brushed the mountain and the search plane crashed, too. Only survivor of a ten-man crew, Sergeant Angelo LaSalle of Des Moines, Iowa, was thrown clear, stumbled away from the burning fragments, fell unconscious in the snow. There he was found by Horst Kupski, a onetime Luftwaffe pilot working for an upland French farmer. Kupski wrapped LaSalle in a blanket, removed his own shoes, coat and hat to clothe the American, got him down the mountainside...
...sure what had happened. The light-keeper thought at first that the explosions had come before the crash. Then he was not so sure. T.W.A. officials guessed from the shape and position of the wreckage that the low-flying Connie had caught a wingtip in the water, said it had plunged into the bay and then exploded. Whatever the cause, it was the sixth misadventure (TIME, July 22 et seq.) on the jinx-ridden Connies' ill-starred record...
...battered officer in the Navy-he had long ago busted his left ankle and split his kneecap playing football, and he had a sort of double elbow on his left arm from an old injury (a fellow pilot dove a seaplane at him and hit the arm with a wingtip float). On the Ti they used to say of Dixie: "He's got so much metal in him the ship's compass follows him when he walks across the deck...
John Dos Passos, novelist (Manhattan Transfer, Big Money) turned LIFE war correspondent in the Philippines, was reported knocked cold, gashed in the head, given a black eye and slight concussion when hit on the head by the wingtip of a landing Piper Cub plane. Correspondent Dos Passos merely noted that he suffered "a nasty little accident (almost got my block knocked off by a plane...