Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 24, 2025
At half-past eleven, the Master issued from his cabin. All alone, and speaking with no man, he took a quarter-hour constitutional up and down the narrow gallery along the side of the fuselage the gallery on which his cabin window opened. His face, by the vague light of the glows in this gallery, looked pale and worn; but a certain gleam of triumph and proud joy was visible in his dark eyes.
He looked down from the fuselage at the bright upturned face. "Oh, aye, it was me," he admitted, "an' A'm michty glad ye was lookin', for A' was throwin' stunts for ye." He was on the ground now, loosening the collar of his leather jacket. He stepped clear of the obstructing planes of his machine and looked anxiously toward the gentle slopes of the ridge on which the bomber had landed.
"That's the tenth and the last, thank God!" said the sweating aide-de-camp. "Heaven and thunder! what an almost catastrophe!" In the amazing spaces of the air, a lean face, pinched and blue with the cold, peered over the fuselage and watched the antlike procession of pin-point dots moving slowly along the snowy road.
The Mustang rolled over and over, her sturdy fuselage refusing to crumple. Stan's one thought was of fire. He pawed aside what was left of his hatch cover and heaved himself upward and out. Staggering free of the wreckage, he found himself enveloped in a choking pall of smoke. Off to his left, a heavy explosion shook the ground.
And now this thought brought a sudden and grave fear to their minds, one unnoticed before. The helium-gas tanks in the hollow wings and rear fuselage! Bullets, spears and arrows striking them would penetrate, and the tanks thus punctured would lose their last ounce of the precious gas! It was a terrible predicament in which the flyers now found themselves, to be sure.
It has all the modern improvements enclosed fuselage, high-curved landing skids, brakes, gyroscopic steadiers, and three speeds, worked by an alteration of the angle of the planes upon the Venetian-blind principle. I took a shot-gun with me and a dozen cartridges filled with buck-shot. You should have seen the face of Perkins, my old mechanic, when I directed him to put them in.
This machine was the first in which the refinement of 'stream-lining' the pilot's head, which became a feature of subsequent racing machines, was introduced. This consisted of a circular padded excresence above the cockpit immediately behind the pilot's head, which gradually tapered off into the top surface of the fuselage.
"The wings and fuselage are both filled," said Paul; "that is what makes the Sky-Bird so light. If you had brought more helium the last time you were here, I could have pumped in twice the quantity, I think, and that would have made her so light she would rise of her own accord, I really believe. As it is, she now weighs less than a half-ounce. I had the scales on her yesterday."
Blinding gusts of rain, sleet and frozen snow buffeted the planes, the shield of the fuselage, and all of himself that was visible. By this time Blaine, the German planes, his own late adversary, had all vanished. He was alone, like a buffeted, tossed, shaken twig, in that wild vortex of darkness and storm.
At Usanga's order one of the blacks lifted her from the ground and carried her to the machine, and after Usanga had clambered aboard, they lifted her up and he reached down and drew her into the fuselage where he removed the thongs from her wrists and strapped her into her seat and then took his own directly ahead of her. The girl turned her eyes toward the Englishman.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking