Word: pistone
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Coattails. The Wankel revolution has been expected for years, chiefly because of the rotary engine's elegant simplicity. Instead of converting up-and-down piston motion into wheel-driving circular energy through a series of complex linkages-the way a standard engine works-the Wankel rotors spin continuously and thus provide the proper torque to move a car's wheels directly. Rotary engines are smaller, peppier and potentially cheaper to build than conventional reciprocating models, and have only six major points of wear, v. 100 in a conventional engine. The most persistent bug, ever since Inventor Felix Wankel...
...Pakistan claimed the plane was India's. Some Bengalis and foreign observers believed it was Pakistani, but other observers pointed out that the only forces known to be flying piston-engined aircraft were the Mukti Bahini, the Bengali liberation forces...
...edges of the beleaguered eastern capital, thousands fled for fear that the Pakistani army might decide to make a pitched stand. Daily, and often hourly, Indian planes strafed airports in Dacca, Karachi and Islamabad. Some 300 children were said to have died in a Dacca orphanage when a piston-engine plane dropped three 750-lb. bombs on the Rahmat-e-Alam Islamic Mission near the airport while 400 children slept inside. Earlier in the week, two large bombs fell on workers' shanties near a jute mill in nearby Narayan-ganj, killing 275 people...
...Piston's Symphony No. 2 (DGG, $6.98). Like Randall Thompson's mellifluous Symphony No. 2 (Leonard Bern stein; Columbia), this eloquently traditional 28-year-old work has survived the original scorn of avant-gardists who should have been hung by their own dog mas. Proud of theme, opulent of chord, it is performed with missionary brio by Michael Tilson Thomas and the Bos ton Symphony...
After the posh jets, the piston-engined Cessna 310 feels like a Volkswagen, but we zoom gallantly up over the brown hills pockmarked with ravines and gullies and head for Las Vegas and a fuel stop. A huge passenger jet bounces us gently in its wake and I shudder. We gas up; off to the southwest we see storm clouds and lightning. Never mind: we're off again. For a moment, I think of those scary instructions picked up back in New York: if both pilots conk out aloft, set the radio dials at 121.5 and ask whoever answers...