Word: yoke
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...experts fitted the pieces together on a wooden frame, like a 3-D jigsaw puzzle. Meanwhile, crews of courageous scientists were flying another Comet (Able Victor) on a long series of hair-raising test flights. Careless of their own lives, they tried to duplicate the stresses that had destroyed Yoke Peter. As Sir Lionel described it, "they were going as close to the tiger as possible, hoping it would not get them." Able Victor did not crash; neither did Comet Yoke Sugar, whose fuel tanks were pressure-strained to see if they would explode...
...same time, a strange structure was rushed to completion at Farnborough. A steel tank (112 ft. long, 60 ft. high, 20 ft. wide) was built around the fuselage of Comet Yoke Uncle. Its wings stuck out at the sides through waterproof rubber packing, and the whole tank, Yoke Uncle and all, was filled with water. Then pumps forced more water into the Comet until the pressure rose to 8¼ lbs. per square inch, equaling the air pressure in a Comet's cabin when it is flying at 40,000 ft. While the pressure was rising, powerful jacks moved...
...after flight. At last came the event that they had been waiting for. After the equivalent of 9,000 hours of flight, the skin of the cabin near a window yielded to metal fatigue. This gave the essential clue. The scientists found a similar break in the fragments of Yoke Peter near the direction-finder window in the roof. Then they traced, fragment by fragment, what had happened with fearful swiftness to the doomed Comet...
...check this theory, Farnborough built 100 small wooden models of the Comet, with parts designed to come apart. They were dropped from balloons or from the top of a hangar. At last one of them broke up in just the way that Yoke Peter did. Its center section spun down to the ground, where its fragments were distributed on the ground in the same pattern that the fragments of Yoke Peter had made on the bottom of the Mediterranean...
...forward seats, one of them with a passenger, moved upward toward the break in the roof. The next row of seats followed close behind. As the "suction wave" raced down the cabin, passengers and seats flew out into space. In two seconds, the scientists figured, the cabin of Yoke Peter must have been empty...