Frank zybach biography

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He had whipped straight under us; missed us by twenty-five, fifty feet, no one knew how much.

The navigator sang out the new course and we were heading for home. Zybach and Daugherty designed and manufactured center pivots based on the strong belief in conserving water and increasing crop quality yields. Jock observed, “There’s a kite on fire dead ahead.” It was a great, golden, slow-moving meteor slanting toward the earth.

He began calling his directions. We flew level then.

Free.

We went out and stood around the big, black four-motored Lancaster, “D for Dog.” A small station wagon delivered a thermos bottle of coffee, chewing gum, an orange, and a bit of chocolate for each man. The German fighters were at him. The small incendiaries were going down like a fistful of white rice thrown on a piece of black velvet.

We saw more battles. They were missing.

There were four reporters on this operation. It seemed to be very close. The clouds below us were white, and we were black.

While slow to gain popularity with farmers and irrigation experts, the many advantages of center-pivot irrigation in saving labor and its uniform and flexible rate of water application began to catch on with farmers in the late 1960's.

While Jock was flinging us about in the air, he suddenly yelled over the intercom, “Two aircraft on the port beam.” I looked astern and saw Wally, the mid-upper, whip his turret around to port, and then looked up to see a single-engine fighter slide just above us. Then there was a tremendous whoomph, an unintelligible shout from the tail gunner, and D-Dog shivered and lost altitude.

The land was dark beneath us. That thirty miles was the longest flight I have ever made.

Dead on time, Buzz the bomb-aimer reported, “Target indicators going down.” At the same moment, the sky ahead was lit up by bright yellow flares. Jack in the rear turret, Wally the mid-upper gunner, Titch the wireless operator, all seemed somehow to draw closer to Jock in the cockpit.

By the mid-1970's, interest in center-pivot irrigation had grown dramatically with nearly 30 firms involved at one time or another in the manufacture and sale of these systems While the number of firms actively involved in the center-pivot industry in the United States has declined to perhaps 10-12 firms, with only six or seven major companies, the impact on the irrigation industry and agriculture has been phenomenal.

We flew steady and straight, and soon the flak was directly below us. Two of them didn’t come back. We were in the slipstream of other Lancasters ahead, and we were over the enemy coast. Just then a new bunch of big flares went down on the far side of the sea of flame that seemed to be directly below us.