Word: pods
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...blasted jet starts its leap from a trailer with a short, upward-slanting ramp. Strapped under its tail is a pod of rocket fuel, which develops 130,000 lbs. of thrust. In three seconds the F-100D is 400 to 500 ft. up and flying at 275 m.p.h. North American's Test Pilot Al Blackburn says the jolt is not bad at all. "It's a piece of cake," he says...
...Force's 100-mile, 1,000-m.p.h. Bell Rascal, already in pilot production. North American's Project WS-131B is an experimental supersonic hydrogen-warhead item with a 350-mile range. And Convair's new supersonic 6-58 jet bomber carries a B58 Pod that can be used, among other things, as a powered air-to-ground missile or a free-fall hydrogen bomb...
Electronic countermeasures have become so vital that many bombers will carry nothing but electronic equipment. Sylvania Electric Products Inc., for instance, is developing a special counter-measures pod to be. carried by a B58 instead of a bomb load or air-to-ground missiles. One or more such B-58s will convoy bomb-armed bombers, shelter them under a canopy of deceitful signals, tell attacking missiles to go away, and, as a last resort, surround the formation with a swarm of small, big-looking decoys...
...speed of the Hustler, unapproached in other large bombers, is partly due to its peculiar "conical camber" delta wing, partly to the concentrated power of its four great General Electric J79 engines (more than 15,000 lbs. thrust each). Another important factor is the "pod" that can be hung below its fuselage. Almost ideally streamlined, the pod has comparatively little drag, but it can carry a large thermonuclear bomb and fuel for the outgoing leg of a long flight. At the target, the pod can be dropped. In effect, the use of the pod eliminates empty bomb bays and fuel...
...pod offers a solution to a critical problem: how to keep the bomber from being destroyed by the effects of its own thermonuclear bomb. The toss-bombing technique (TIME, Sept. 24), which projects the bomb forward and upward while the bomber turns on its back and gets away, does not give a big margin of safety in the case of high-yield bombs. But if the pod is engineered as an air-to-ground missile with rocket propulsion of its own, it can be launched while the Hustler is many miles away from the target. While it is still curving...