Word: speed
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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...dark, aloof young man who wore a regulation flying suit and helmet but no markings, and had a revolver on his hip. Pilot Francis Gary Powers, 30, climbed into the one-man cockpit, gunned the black ship's single engine, and as the plane climbed toward take-off speed, the wide wings stiffened and the awkward outrigger wheels that had served as ground support dropped away...
...circumscribed by the fuel supply. Editor Sekigawa, a glider pilot himself, speculated that the U-2 was built to climb under its own power, soar with its engine cut, for long, valuable miles in the thin upper atmosphere. Its Pratt & Whitney J57 turbojet engine could kick it along at speeds just under the speed of sound, and its light frame could almost surely be coaxed to altitudes close...
...tested for surface cracks, X-rayed for hidden flaws in the metal. Most rugged test of all: Lockheed pilots are flying a minutely instrumented Electra through the extremely turbulent "Sierra wave'' over California's Sierra Nevada mountains, are slamming into the wind-shears at high speed to see what happens in the clear-air turbulence reported at the time the two airline planes went down...
...Federal Aviation Agency Chief Elwood R. Quesada flew out to a meeting with Lockheed Board Chairman Robert Gross, issued a statement saying that "we are satisfied that we are boring in on an area that is going to be definitive." In the meantime, added Quesada, under the FAA-imposed speed limit of 295 m.p.h.. the Electras in operation have "a margin of structural safety over and above any other aircraft in the commercial field...
...frog in a walnut. Then the two dinky, 6-h.p. engines perched behind the seat begin to snarl, and the bedspring contraption becomes a hot, highly engineered racing machine that can hit 85 m.p.h. on the straightaway, drift through corners like a Maserati. Says one driver: "The feeling of speed is fantastic! Even at 30 m.p.h. you feel like you're leading the pack at Le Mans...