Word: pilot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Spot of Cash." In time, he set up headquarters in Zurich, where an auburn-haired beauty-shop owner named Trudi Sommer, 29. was only too happy to have him share her apartment. She thought he was a Canadian test pilot named Johnny Bird. Then, one night last January, for reasons he was never quite able to explain, Hume wandered off to a church, where he drank up all the communion wine. Next morning, armed with a pistol, he turned up at a small branch of Zurich's Gewerbebank to help himself to "a spot of cash...
...unsafe for future Septembers, the proud old fighters purred peacefully over London for the last time. Hardly had Spitfire Sugar Love 574 passed out of sight of the nostalgic crowd on the Horse Guards Parade when its engine began to cough and sputter. Losing altitude rapidly, the pilot, Air Vice Marshal Harold John Maguire, spotted a green and empty sports field and prepared to belly-land on it. As the Oxo and Old Hollingtonian cricket teams, which had just retired to the pavilion for their half-time tea, watched in amazement, the stricken Spitfire shot in, flaps down and wheels...
Climbing out of his cockpit with a reassuring wave to the old Hurricane circling overhead, Pilot Maguire apologized to the cricketers for damaging their wicket, and joined them at tea in the pavilion. Tea concluded, the game was resumed. Pushed off the playing field, its propeller, undercarriage and one wing broken, Spitfire Sugar Love rested at last on the sidelines-a silent spectator of the way of life it had helped to preserve...
...meet his plane. One by one, the passengers filed down the ramp-but no Demara. The stewardess said that Ferdinand had indeed been on the New York-Hollywood flight, but he seemed to have disappeared. Just as Producer Bloch turned to walk away, a bulky man dressed like a pilot tapped him on the shoulder: "You looking for a guy named Demara?" "Yes," replied Bloch, "we sure are. Was he on your plane?" Off came the braid-encrusted cap. "Well, here I am," said the imposing (6 ft., 270 Ibs.), self-assured impostor, "ready for work...
...lover of Hersey's story is Buzz Marrow, pilot of a bomber called The Body, so named because of the nude painted on its nose. Buzz looks like a burly motorcycle cop, rakes over his crew in billingsgate, yips earsplitting war whoops as the bombs drop away, and slavers over off-duty hobbies that would make good latrine-wall copy. Why diffident Copilot Charles Boman, the novel's first-person narrator, hero-worships Buzz is a mystery, but it is presumably because Marrow oozes self-confidence and is a genius at the flight controls. Poor Bo is colorless...