Word: bombsight
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Retired General Curtis LeMay peered through his bombsight and let loose with a blockbuster. Target: the U.S. air war over North Viet Nam. "We're hitting the wrong targets," said the former Air Force Chief of Staff last week in Washington. "We're getting people killed who shouldn't be killed because of too little and too late." The U.S. attacks, LeMay remarked, "should have knocked hell out of 'em-so we must be hitting the wrong targets. We should bomb the things that really would hurt them, industry, ports, power plants. We've been...
Died. Carl Lukas Norden, 85, inventor of World War II's famed Norden bombsight, a Dutch engineer who in 1904 emigrated to the U.S., in the early 1920s developed the first successful plane-arresting gear for U.S. aircraft carriers (the Saratoga and Lexington), with partner Theodore H. Barth was commissioned by the Navy to devise a better bombsight and in 1939 finally produced a compact (12 in. by 19 in.), though enormously complex, $25,000 instrument so precise that U.S. bombardiers could, as they loved to brag, literally "hit a pickle barrel from 20,000 ft."; of pneumonia...
This was to be a "freestyle" bombing run, i.e., a visual approach was permitted, and the navigator-bombardier (now called the "observer") could make free use of his optical equipment, including a high-powered telescope in the bombsight. The Campbell Soup target was vital to the City of Merced, because on her previous flight, an unpredictable wind shift had drifted her off course, and she scored only one point out of a possible...
Despite his visual alternative, Observer Jose ("Joe") Holguin chose to strike at Sacramento by radar. Twenty-five miles from the target, Major Holguin, at his bombsight controls up forward, became the key man in the City of Merced: Beau Traylor had only to maintain air speed. His face glued to the radarscope and its tireless, swinging line of light, Joe Holguin made manual adjustments to keep the crosshairs on the pip that marked his target. Nearly everything was handled by the "K" system, the fabulous new Air Force apparatus that automatically navigates, flies the plane and releases the bomb. From...
...basic TACair battle units might be four fighter-bombers. One will carry the atomic weapon. Another will act as cover-man and possibly carry a high-altitude precision bombsight. The others will serve as tankers for the first two, and will themselves be refueled from a C-130 tanker a safe distance away from the battle area...