Word: messerschmitt
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...years ago, a series of similar crashes shook the entire German military establishment. In 1965 alone, 26 of the Lockheed-designed interceptors, built under license by Messerschmitt, fell out of the sky. The wreck rate was a disastrous 83.6 crashes per 100,000 hours of flying time; the international norm is between 15 and 20 crashes per 100,000 flying hours. One problem was that the Germans turned what had been designed as a fairweather, high-altitude interceptor into a low-altitude, multipurpose fighter-bomber and tried to fly it in the tricky weather of Central Europe. Another difficulty...
...whole Cabinet except Attorney General John Mitchell (who was addressing the American Bar Association convention in Dallas), 44 Governors, 50 Senators and Representatives, and ambassadors and charges d'affaires from 83 lands. Other guests included Nixon Friends Bebe Rebozo and Billy Graham, Aerospacemen Wernher von Braun and Willy Messerschmitt, and a nostalgic gallery of showbiz figures that included Rudy Vallee, Cesar Romero, Edgar Bergen and Gene Autry. Aviation Pioneers Howard Hughes and Charles Lindbergh were invited, but neither broke his long, self-imposed seclusion to come...
Before World War II, Bayerische Motoren Werke was famous as a maker of motorcycles and racing cars. During the war, the Munich plant produced airplane engines for the Junker bombers and for Hitler's jet fighter, the Messerschmitt ME 262. In 1947, after the U.S. Army stopped using BMW's shops to repair its tanks, the company started making motorcycles again, and began looking around for a car design as well. Misjudging the market, BMW decided on an eight-cylinder luxury job which cost so much to build that it lost money from the start. Simultaneously, the company...
...Germans blame the Starfighter crashes, in which 37 pilots have perished, on faulty maintenance and the fact that most of the pilots are inexperienced. To overcome the problems, the Bonn Defense Ministry is now farming out maintenance on the 1,450 m.p.h. planes to such skilled German firms as Messerschmitt, is sending pilots to the U.S. for training. Just in case, it has decided to install better ejection seats so that fewer lives will be lost in the falling Starfighters...
Happy to Try. Tall, hollow-eyed Rudolf Hess has been a prisoner ever since the night of May 10, 1941, when he shocked the world by parachuting from a Messerschmitt fighter onto the Duke of Hamilton's estate in Scotland. His mission, he claimed, was to end the war between "the great Nordic nations" Britain and Germany. Hess did not have the approval of Hitler for his peacemaking mission, and indeed was quickly denounced by the Führer as "crazy." Hess remains convinced of the sacredness of his mission. "True, I achieved nothing," he wrote. "I could...