Word: grounding
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...nation from Puerto Rico to California-and his outposts in England, Japan and Okinawa-bristled with readiness. His officers wore their sidearms at desks, at meals and in the air; his "A.P.s" (air police-Air Force for M.P.s) cradled loaded carbines ready for sabotage or parachute attack. Even ground crewmen worked at their big planes with their guns beside them. At one base Curt LeMay strode by a master sergeant who had laid aside his piece to dive into his lunch bag. The C.G. rounded up all the maintenance men for one of his longer speeches. "This afternoon," said...
...complicated and outsize bombers demand ice-cold thinking, endurance and guts from the men who fly them. The Consolidated Vultee B-36, a cigar-shaped aerial monster, is LeMay's blue-ribbon flying warship. It costs $4,700,000 before it ever gets off the ground (a small submarine costs $6,000,000). The tanks in its 230-ft. wing can swallow 2½ tank-car loads of gasoline, enough to feed its six pusher engines for nearly two days. It can cruise over the enemy out of sight of earth-and, the Air Force insists, fairly well above...
...years and 3,000 hours' flight experience. LeMay laced SAC with veteran pilots, navigators and bombardiers from his old World War II bomber commands in England, India and the Marianas. Around them he has tailored the individual B-36 flight crews, trains them for weeks in ground school and on the Consolidated assembly line before he allows them to set foot in the super-plane...
Thirty continuous hours in the air, ground out in the seconds, degrees and miles of a B-36 flight, mean packing aboard survival kits for the Arctic, life rafts for the ocean, 100 Ibs. of food* to be cooked in two tiny electric ovens-and endless time for minor irritations of dreadnought flying to sap the toughest crewman. The crew's sections are pressurized like bug-bombs. To get from the nose compartment to the rear chamber a crewman has to lie full length on a little roller sled, pull himself hand over hand down an 85-ft. connecting...
...only place where he is likely to unbend is in the privacy of the commanding general's red brick house, across from the green Offutt parade ground. There, in the evenings, he sits in a comfortable armchair pulling at his ever-present pipe. His gregarious, twinkly eyed wife Helen, whom he met 19 years ago at a dance, is not afraid to chatter, or to stray as far from the point as she chooses. SAC's officers have unconcealed admiration for LeMay's eleven-year-old daughter Jane, who frequently tells...