belly landing

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pages: 522 words: 144,605

Spitfire: A Very British Love Story by John Nichol

belly landing, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Etonian, friendly fire, Suez canal 1869

At any moment they expected the machine to give out and plummet into the sea. Then they had a stroke of luck. The direction-finding instrument suddenly sprang into life, giving their position and course. The nearest airfield was Westerland, on the island of Sylt, just off the Denmark peninsula. They headed straight for it, making a belly-landing. They had survived. Just. It was a testament to the He111’s durability. It had been estimated that bombers needed to be hit a maximum of 300 times to be sure of destruction. ‘Counted holes in aircraft,’ the gunner recorded. ‘Three hundred and fifty.’ The bomber’s resilience and the Spitfire’s inability to bring it down only strengthened German confidence. 72 Squadron’s encounter did not go unnoticed.

as a fighter turned just in time to avoid a stream of 109 shells. The Malta veterans, both Spitfire and Hurricane, then demonstrated just how determined they had become. One attacked a 109 head-on. Neither broke off and they collided. The German lost an entire wing, the Spitfire its wingtip. As the fighter made a belly-landing, with Hurricanes struggling to provide overhead cover, the pilot jumped out and dashed for cover. As he did so, bullets kicked up the ground around his feet. The Germans were intent on destroying the new Spitfires before they could get into the air. Three hundred Axis bombers struck Takali airfield on 20 April 1942, the day they arrived.

Then, as blood flowed down his face, he felt for the pilot’s door handle at his side and opened it. ‘I crawled out and crawled as far as I could from the aircraft, because the Huns were great ones for coming back and shooting you up on the ground.’ Ground crew then came running to pick him up and get him into an ambulance to the field hospital. Like many pilots who had performed a belly-landing, Robbie had discovered that the Spitfire was resilient in protecting its pilots as it broke up. Only his shoulder was bruised from the crash. ‘The Spitfire could take an enormous amount of punishment without any damage to the pilot.’ But Robertson’s right eye had been lacerated with shrapnel from the German bullet.


pages: 385 words: 48,143

The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur by Randy Komisar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, belly landing, discounted cash flows, estate planning, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs

Yet Bill's leadership was so powerful that no one from the management team bailed out. This was a group of talented people, most of whom went on to leadership roles at other companies, including their own successful startups. But because of Bill, no one pulled the cord. Everyone rode that plane all the way down to a belly landing. When I finally did leave GO in 1993, it wasn't clear what I wanted to do next. In the years we worked together, Campbell had periodically suggested that I consider becoming a CEO. He had encouraged me to prepare for the role by giving me projects and responsibilities that would help me run a business at some point.


pages: 319 words: 84,772

Speed by Bob Gilliland, Keith Dunnavant

Airbus A320, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Neil Armstrong, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, US Airways Flight 1549, work culture

“I never sensed any sort of panic or concern,” Robert recalled. “He was very calm, very professional.” Bob began circling the airport to burn off fuel, which would make the plane less combustible on impact, less likely to explode in a fireball if they were forced to scrape across the runway in a belly landing. He kept tinkering, at one point turning the controls over to Robert—“Just hold it steady, son”—so he could use both hands to investigate the busted switch. Finally, they heard a familiar vibration from below as the wheels locked into place, allowing them to land safely. “I didn’t fully appreciate the situation until I looked out the window and saw all these flashing lights from the fire trucks lined up on the runway,” Robert said.


Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff

belly landing, Ford Model T, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, New Journalism, three-masted sailing ship

Smith feared diverting half his PBY fleet to a dangerous and untested rescue attempt. Danger to crews and equipment was a legitimate concern. A PBY Catalina might suffer catastrophic stress and break into pieces during a hard landing on snow and ice. Smith also knew that the most challenging part of the rescue might not be the belly landing, but the very act of flying over Greenland in the midst of winter. Pritchard and the Duck had done fine in landings and takeoffs, but they went down as a result of storms and fog. In fact, Smith had already squashed discussion of sending the Coast Guard cutter North Star close enough to the east coast to use its Grumman Duck for a rescue attempt.


pages: 473 words: 140,480

Factory Man: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local - and Helped Save an American Town by Beth Macy

8-hour work day, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apollo 13, belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, call centre, company town, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, desegregation, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, Joseph Schumpeter, new economy, old-boy network, one-China policy, race to the bottom, reshoring, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, special economic zone, supply-chain management, Thomas L Friedman, union organizing, value engineering, work culture

He had movie-star good looks and a death-defying war tale that became the basis for a 1948 film featuring Robert Stack. In September 1944, his squadron was tasked with destroying the Nazi rail lines in Hungary. A fellow fighter pilot’s blast backfired, knocking out the cooling system of his plane, and the man was forced to make a belly landing deep in enemy territory. From the air, Wyatt watched it unfold in his single-seat plane, prompting a radio discussion among the pilots about what to do. Above all, their commanders had instructed them, they should not let any of the American planes, with their brand-new radar and communications technology, fall into enemy hands.


pages: 781 words: 226,928

Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall

Apple II, belly landing, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Byte Shop, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, Computer Lib, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Firefox, Ford Model T, game design, Gary Kildall, Great Leap Forward, index card, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Ken Thompson, low skilled workers, Menlo Park, packet switching, pink-collar, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, Ted Nelson, vertical integration

Commodore also continued developing a hard drive. Feagans’ loyalty to Tramiel was beyond question. He began to enjoy rewards reserved for inner family members, including flying on the corporate jet in November 1980. “Jack flew me and my wife to Las Vegas for Comdex, and also our honeymoon, on the loaner PET Jet after the belly landing in Iowa,” says Feagans. “That was my first meeting with Jim Finke.” At the newly reopened Moorpark offices, where the disk drive designers now resided, Feagans continued working on the concepts introduced to him by Robert Metcalfe, including networking and graphical user interfaces. The others began work on a data storage device using VCR tape.


pages: 826 words: 231,966

GCHQ by Richard Aldrich

belly landing, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial exploitation, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, friendly fire, illegal immigration, index card, it's over 9,000, lateral thinking, machine translation, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Kinnock, New Journalism, operational security, packet switching, private military company, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, social intelligence, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, undersea cable, unit 8200, University of East Anglia, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

The Soviets spent several weeks inspecting the aircraft before it was returned to the RAF. The incident earned Coleman the unwelcome nickname ‘Dan Dare’. The following year, another Gloster Meteor on a ‘radio calibration flight’ from Watton arrived unannounced in East Germany. Again the pilots had run out fuel, but this time they could not find a runway, and opted for a belly landing in a field. After a suitable delay for technical inspection of the radio warfare equipment on board, the Meteor was again returned by the Soviets. On the night of 26 June 1955 there was a much more serious incident, when a radio countermeasures Lincoln (WD132) from 199 Squadron exercising over West Germany collided with a USAF F-86D Sabre jet fighter.