Word: takeoff
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Cunning Bun. Around 10:30 the Nixons quietly left. Their takeoff was followed by the departure of stiff, proper Society Matron Mrs. Merriweather Post, hair in cunning bun, dignity coolly intact. Hardly anyone cared; the band blasted out with Hold That Tiger, and for hours that tiger was really loose; jitterbugging, rock 'n' rolling, the crowd poured it on. At length, in the early hours of the morning, the party and the liquor began to subside. Tired, rumpled and glassy-eyed, the guests found their way to the door. Last to leave: Senator Russ Long, his face glowing...
...Finally Pilot Marsh checked the weather again, decided to go. It was 6:01 p.m. when the plane lumbered down the runway into the darkness, lifted heavily off the ground and, slowly gaining altitude, went into an inexplicable left turn over the East River. Only twelve seconds after the takeoff, it steepened its turn and began to settle. Seconds later it hit the ground, burst into flames. Plight 823 was down on tiny Rikers Island in the middle of the river...
...flyers traveled at about half the speed of the earth (1,000 m.p.h. at the equator), the time span between sunrises was compressed to 16-hr. "sun days," half light, half dark. They caught their first sunset over the Great Lakes, a few hours after their i p.m. takeoff, thereafter saw the sun rise and set at eight-hour intervals, i.e., sunrise over the Atlantic, sunset over Saudi Arabia, sunrise over Malaya, sunset over Guam, sunrise in California. Total: three sunrises, three sunsets in a period just a few hours short of two full normal-sized days...
...Abby's swift climb is the more remarkable because her column often reads like a parody of other lovelornists. In fact, San Franciscans at first thought that Abby even concocted her own letters as a deliberate takeoff. One letter to the Chronicle that is still quoted with glee came from a girl who confessed: "My boy friend took me out on my 21st birthday and wanted to show me a very special good time. I usually don't go in much for drinking, but I had three martinis. During dinner we split a bottle of wine. After dinner...
Then, with frostbite already showing on Dufek's nose, the party stomped back into the airplane, its engines still turning over. But when Pilot Conrad Shinn gunned his engines and fired four JATO (jet assist) bottles for takeoff, the R4D stuck fast, its skis frozen to the icy surface. Only by blasting off his eleven remaining JATO bottles did Shinn wrench the plane loose and stagger into the thin air at well below normal take-off speed. Back at McMurdo, Dufek ordered establishment of the Siple camp delayed for two weeks ("If it was too cold...