Word: pilot
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...audience he told an eye-bugging tale of a slight mishap on his nonstop flight from Casablanca to Los Angeles (7,688.48 mi.) last June, when he spent a sleepless 58 hr. 38 min. in the cockpit of a single-engined Piper Comanche. Just before taking off from Morocco, Pilot Conrad stuffed his navigational charts in a brown envelope, a clutch of unpaid bills in another. He handed what he believed to be the bills to a well-wishing U.S. consular official, then flew off crosswind, with a one-ton overload of fuel, into the blue yonder, westbound for Trinidad...
...ship accelerated past Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound). The F.A.I, specifies that an airplane trying for a straightaway, level-flight record must not climb or dive more than 164 ft. over the course. To respect these narrow limits at better than 1,500 m.p.h. is quite a pilot's trick. Admitted Major Rogers afterward: "I came within 3 ft. of going...
...Pilot Rogers covered the course twice at an average speed of 1,525.95 m.p.h., as measured by radar, tracking cameras and two men lying on their backs on the desert, sighting upward past tight-stretched wires that marked start and finish. The metal skin of the F106 touched 340°F.; a lot of its grey paint was burned off, and its Air Force insignia bubbled and blistered. It landed with almost empty tanks, but it had beaten Russia's record of 1,483.83 m.p.h...
...prepare for the record-breaking flight, Lockheed and the Air Force worked out a new flight plan. They decided that the F-104C should climb only to 40,000 ft., where the air is still dense enough to give the jet maximum thrust. When the plane hit full speed, Pilot Jordan was to zoom upward at a climb angle of between...
...developed his writing in Professor John Berdan's daily-theme course. Commissioned a Marine lieutenant on graduation in 1940 (he is now a retired light colonel), he was in flight school on Dec. 7, 1941. After a series of courses in radar and electronics at Harvard and M.I.T., Pilot Seamon was assigned to a photo-mapping outfit. At the controls of a PB4Y-I, he and his crew dodged flack and fought off enemy fighters to make a map for the invasion of Guam...