Word: piloted
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being." -John Ruskin Six thousand feet above Arkansas the left outboard engine of the big DC-6 began to pop dangerous orange flames. Unhurriedly, as became his 52 years and his 20,000 flying hours, Pilot Laurens Claude flicked the switches, cutting the bad power plant and feathering its propeller. On her three good engines, American Airlines' Aztec, New York-to-Mexico City luxury liner, purred steadily on course for Dallas, 300 miles southwest...
Eighty minutes later Pilot Claude banked the big DC-6 into line with the twinkling lights of Love Field's long north-south runway, lowered the wheels and wingflaps for landing. Suddenly the outboard right engine sputtered and died. The two good engines bellowed as he poured power to them to lengthen his glide, but the Aztec was caught-sluggish and vu'nerable-in the drag of her extended landing gear and flaps. "She's a goner." shouted First Officer Robert Lewis. The Aztec's nose went up as she shuddered in a stall. Her left...
...Pilot Claude, Copilot Lewis, their flight engineer and 15 of the Aztec's 41 passengers escaped from the white-hot pyre. When the wreckage had cooled, an American Airlines ground crewman stood sobbing as he kept count, in a little black notebook, of the bodies carried from the blackened metal. Total: 28. Three days later the heads of eleven major U.S. airlines were feted in Chicago at a luncheon (scheduled long before the crash) to honor commercial aviation's record for safety. Their statistics proved that IQ49, even including the Dallas crash, could still...
That night, while the weather lay thick and foul over the Norwegian coast, the control tower at Oslo airport received a garbled message from the DC-3's pilot. Forty-two hours later, after searching parties had scoured the countryside in vain, a lumberjack walking near Oslo Fjord heard the thin cry of a child. He found the wreckage of the DC-3; sitting primly in his seat in the plane's tail, his safety belt fastened, rain-soaked and spattered with oil, was Isaac Allal...
Three Skyrockets have been built. One has cracked up; the remaining two have been used as flying laboratories in the hands of two redoubtable old men of the air: the Navy's Captain William Virginius Davis, 47, and Douglas' test pilot, Gene May, who is 45 and a grandfather...