| # |
Message |
Posted By |
| 56168 |
air force: vocabulary )2)
here there are some more words i need:
-wing man.
-spot landing
-windmill speed.
-trim
-propeller shaft
Thanx again!
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
|
|
|
| 56287 |
Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 1 of 5
Hi, American,
It's funny, I was in the Air force for eight years, and I never heard of most of those expressions you mentioned. What are you doing, reading a Richard Bach novel or something?
Anyway, it's a very interesting puzzle, and I thought I'd see how much I could help with. I speak pretty good Spanish, but I have no vocabulary to deal with these terms, so I'll explain to you in English as much as I can, and if you want to ask me questions in Spanish, I'll give it my best shot. Of course, there's bound to be someone around who knows some of these that I don't.
-hit a brace.: I never heard this one. What was the context? How was the expression used? Is it possible you misheard somebody who meant to say either "hit the brakes" or "hit the bricks?" Hit the brakes means to stop a plan that is underway. If I am going to lead an assault on a local village and I discover that the enemy has bombed the bridge I'm depending on to get to the village, I might have to hit the brakes on my assault plans. To "hit the bricks" means to go out on the streets and work at something, usually, looking for a job, or selling a product door-to-door." It basically means to get busy doing work that requires a lot of traveling through the streets. "the bricks" refer to the cobblestones that many streets have been made of—many more in the past than now—at least here en los EEUU. It's also possible that "hit a brace" may have had some very literal meaning. For example, the two-winged "biplanes" flown in world war I were supported by a structure of struts and braces. In a "dogfight", where two planes battled in the air trying to shoot each other down, one plane might have shot out a brace supporting the wing of the other plane. So the enemy might have "hit a brace" shooting at the other plane.
See part 2 of 5
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56168
|
|
|
| 56288 |
Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 2 of 5
Part 2 of 5
-fourth classman Or this one. Again, I might have a better idea with the context. The only numberings of classmen I know of are ranks and academy statues. Cadets at the academy are either upperclassmen or underclassmen, depending on how long they've been in the academy. I'm not sure, but I think the freshmen and sophomores are underclassmen and the juniors and seniors are upperclassmen. I don't know about the numbers, though. I was briefly an Airman first class when I had two stripes on my sleeve. This is the second promotion you get after you enlist, if you start at the lowest level. There used to be an Airman second class many years ago when the Air Force first split off from the Army, but they changed that to Airman. There hasn't been a second class for years, and I don't think there were ever third class or fourth class airmen. Sometimes, we use the expressions "second class" or "third class" or "third rate" to say that something has poor quality. "I'm tired of going to this second-class school" or "I'm tired of being treated like a second class citizen". I've never heard of anyone using "fourth class" in this way, though.
-to be a seat of the pants. I wonder if you are quoting this one exactly right. I've never heard it said this way, but I have often heard the expression, to "fly by the seat of your pants." If you're flying a plane and your instruments fail, and visibility is poor due to bad weather, you have no way to know which direction to fly. You have to guess and hope you end up flying where you wanted to. It's possible that this expression is also used when visibility is okay but you have to gauge all of your maneuvers by hand and by eye. I don't know why they call this "by the seat of your pants" It may have something to do with the anxiety. You may have noticed that when you're flying in a plane and the weather is bad, people tend to hold onto the arms of the chairs very tightly, almost as if they hope to keep the plain in the air by pulling up on the arms of the chairs. We have a lot of jokes about that phenomenon, because we always do it. Of course, the pilot cant, because he has to keep his hands on the control stick, so perhaps he's clutching tight to the chair with "the seat of his pants" while he's flying the plane. That's just a guess, of course.
-right face (this one could be sth like "vista derecha"?) I don't know, but that sounds good to me. "Right face" is the command your commanding officer gives when you're in formation and he wants everyone to turn ninety degrees to the right.
See part 3 of 5
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56168
|
|
|
| 56289 |
Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 3 of 5
Part 3 of 5
-stall. This word describes what happens to a plane when it's not moving fast enough for air pressure to keep it in the air. The plane begins to drop like a rock, and it usually starts spiraling as it falls, so it can make the pilot really dizzy, which is part of why it's so dangerous. Of course, it's also critical to know what to do if it happens, so I understand that pilots are required to learn how to put the plane into a stall and then recover from it as part of their training. Stunt flyers love to use stalling maneuvers in their routines because they're so scary and so spectacular to watch. One of my favorite tricks is called a hammerhead stall, where a plane flies straight up, another perfect way to force the plane to stall. The plane then falls sideways into a spiral, and then the pilot will recover from that and move into another maneuver.
-skids.—I don't know this one. It may have something to do with parking the plane on the flight line. If you tell me the context you heard it in, I might have a better idea.. IT could refer to the way the plane slides off course to the side if it tries to bank too sharply in a turn (the same way a car can skid when you turn too sharply at high speed, or it could refer to a part of the mechanism that makes the landing gear work. It could also refer to the platforms that cargo is stored on for loading the cargo onto the plane, or it could refer to the design of the mechanisms in the plane that allow workers to load the loaded platforms onto the plane.
-slips.: I don't know what this is all about. Again, if you give me the rest of the sentence, it might help. I know that slips are parking places for boats in a marina. I guess it's not impossible that they have slips for planes, too at some air fields. You also might be thinking of the slipstream. As you know, when a boat is speeding through the water, it leaves a path behind it on the surface of the water that we call the "wake" in English. Naturally, a plane flying through the air also leaves a path of disturbed air behind it, just like the boat disturbs the water. We can't see the "wake" of a plane, but we know it's their, especially if we've ever been standing at the side of the freeway when cars are speeding by. We hear them and we feel them. So when a moving object creates a "wake" in the air it is moving through, we call that "wake" a slipstream. OF course, I don't know if that's what you're looking for. There's also something called a sideslip, where a plane moves sideways through the air—kind of like intentionally making the plane skid sideways as it turns-just like one of the meanings of "skid" I suggested above. .
See part 4 of 5
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56168
|
|
|
| 56290 |
Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 4 of 5
Part 4 of 5
-Flight, atention( could FLIGHT here mean COMPAÑíA?). Yes. The unit of manpower that the army calls a "company" (about 25 or 50 soldiers) is called a "flight" in the air force. So instead of addressing the company, which is an army expression, the Air Force addresses the flight.
-to buzz the field. This is a really obnoxious practice pilots use to harass ground and to risk their lives. It's really poplar in flying movies and such, but in the real world, pilots will get in serous trouble for doing it because it is very dangerous. "Buzzing" someone or something (like the air field the plane is about to land on) is flying really low over it. It gives the pilot a cheap thrill because he gets to show off being a brave guy, and it scares the bejeezus (the hell) out of anyone on the ground below being buzzed, because suddenly you have this airplane coming at you and the engines are roaring outrageously loudly, and you don't know if the pilot is playing with you or if he's about to crash on your head or what. If you've ever seen the movie, "Catch-22", you might remember that awful scene where one of the pilots is flying low over the water, and this guy on a raft gets killed, and then the pilot flies away and crashes into a mountain and kills himself. What that was all about was that he was trying to buzz the guy on the raft (and flying by the seat of his pants, because the instruments won't help you do a stupid thing like that). Well, I told you it was a stupid, dangerous thing to do, and that's why the guy on the raft got killed. The pilot miscalculated, and hit the kid with the propeller of the plane. And that's why he then went and killed himself flying the plane into the mountain—because it was such an awful, stupid thing, and he couldn't live with himself having killed a guy like that. Anyway, buzzing is flying really low to show off or to scare people on the ground.
-crankshaft. Here again, I really need to know the situation how this was used. A crankshaft is the shaft in an engine that all of the pistons are mounted on. The crankshaft is all cranky shaped, like the pedal crank on your bicycle, so that as it rotates, the pistons will all rise and fall at different cycles. This makes sure that the force of energy pushing one piston down will drive another one up to compress another chamber.
See part 5 of 5
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56168
|
|
|
| 56291 |
Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 5 of 5
Part 5 of 5
Because a crankshaft is all crooked and twisty, sometimes we use the term "crankshaft" to describe someone who's a little bit loco. When somebody's ideas don't seem to follow a predictable pattern, we call them a crankshaft, because a crankshaft is designed to alter the pattern that something attached to it rotates. We have a cartoon here in the US called "Crankshaft". It's a double pun, because not only is the main character of the cartoon a little bit crazy, and therefore a crankshaft for that reason, but he's also a very "cranky" person. We say a person is cranky when they are grumpy or irritable. "Crankshaft" is written by Tom Batiuk and Chuck Ayers. Plug them into your search engine and check them out.
-crankshaft journal. A journal could be like a newspaper or a magazine of some kind. So a crankshaft journal could be a disreputable one whose articles can't be counted on to report facts accurately. We generally think of "tabloids" as being "crankshaft journals" As always, context is very helpful
-wing man. When flying in formation, generally four planes fly together in a diamond-shaped arrangement. The leader flies ahead with a wing-man on each side, just behind him, and a fourth plane flying at the back between the two wing-men. The planes at the right and left of the formation are called wing men, because they are flying at the wings of the leading plane.
-spot landing: I'm not familiar with this one. Taking a wild guess at it, I'd have to point out that planes always have a certain amount of room they need to have available to them in order to land. This is why aircraft carriers are so big and so long. If they were too short, you can imagine the plains would all skid right across the flight deck and fall of the end of the carrier right back into the ocean. My guess is that a spot landing is a landing that is so short that the pilot has just barely enough room to touch the ground and bring the plane safely to stop.
-windmill speed. I've never heard of this. Context, Context. My wild guess is that the blades of a windmill turn very slowly compared to the blades of the propeller of a plane. I'm guessing that " windmill" speed would probably be very slow.
-trim: move the flaps of the plane, the aileron and the vertical stabilizer to maintain proper course, heading and flight "attitude" (pointed the right direction with the correct side up).
-propeller shaft: Just like the axle of your car carries the energy from the engine to your wheels, the plane needs a shaft—a metal rod, very much like an axle—that carries energy from the engine of the plane to the propeller that must spin to drive the plane forward. The propeller shaft is the rod coming out of the nose of the engine that the propeller bolts onto the end of.
That was fun. Thanks for asking. Let me know the context for any of the answers I gave that didn't make sense.
Best,
Mark Springer
Sacramento, CA
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56168
|
|
|
| 56384 |
Re:Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 5 of 5
Hi, Mark!
Thank you very much for your help.
I didn’t imagine i was going to receive so much info, so thanks for the time you invested, too.
Now, you tell me u were in the air force for 8 years and never heard of some of these expressions, and well, yes, i understand this since it’s known novels and films not always reflect absolute reality.
I’m not reading a novel by R.Bach, but you were close, since i‘ve been working on the translation of the script of a an old film called “ Air Cadet”, (1951), where a group of cadets learn how to do acrobatics in the air, and translating that air force lingo has been really taugh.
After doing a research on the web and reading ur notes i’ve been able to cope with everything, but what i haven’t found is the meaning of the expression “hit a brace”.
I ‘ll transcribe a section where the phrase appears to see if u can get the exact or the approximate meaning.
This is the situation: there’s an upperclassman who’s in charge of a group of cadets, he’s barking orders, then he starts a brief conversation with one of the cadets, after which he resumes and says:
“All right you men, hit a brace. Come on. Gain some altitude!
Right face. Forward, harch!”
“Hit a brace” appears several times in situations like the one above.
Now, i haven’t actually ‘seen’ the movie , if i had, it would have been easier to get the idea, but i guess it must be sth like ‘get going” or sth like that., i ‘m not sure, what´s your idea?
Thanks, once again.
Rosana.
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56291
|
|
|
| 56459 |
Re:Re:Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 5 of 5
Hola Rosana,
I think I got it! Lo encontré con una definición que hace razón. El "brace" es a very straight, tall posture. Así que "hit a brace" puede querer decir lo mismo con "attention". Y si lo es cierto, ese oración acerca de conseguir "altitude" también será muy claro. Parar de manera muy recta se hace muy grande, y lo da al hombre más altitud. ¿Qué crees?
Una cosa más: a mi me mantienes en vilo. Dime cómo has entendido las oraciones raras que hemos discutido. ¿Qué quieren decir "fourth classman", "be a seat of the pants", "skids," "crankshaft journal", "windmill speed ," y "spot landing?"
Con recuerdos,
Mark
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56384
|
|
|
| 56569 |
Re:Re:Re:Re:air force: vocabulary, Part 5 of 5
Hi Mark!
Well, now it all makes sense, thanks!
As to the way i dealt with the the words and expressinos u ask:
I was lucky enough to find a web page with the spanish for english terms referring to engines + another only in spanish with the drawings and words referring to the main sections of a plane engine, so taking into account the contex, + what i found on the web + what i asked at home i came to the conclusion that cranckshaft journal is a “rodamento”, a part of the engine, the word journal is kind of misleading here, but well, it was the only logical possibility acc. to context.
Windmill speed , i just wrote “ a esta velocidad”, not too many details!
Spot landing, “área de llegada”
Fourthclassman “ cadete avanzado”
As to skids and seat of the pants, i don´t remember the exact translation and at this very moment i don´t have time to check the whole thing to find these expressions, but in the case of skid i referred to the movement, and as to seat of the pants i gave an interpretation of the idea, bc, as u said, the usual expression is “fly by...”, i wrote sth like, “no soy bueno para esto”.
Ok, Mark, thanks for ur time and interest.
From time to time, not very often, i come here for help, so may be u´ll be willing t o give me a hand on some other occasion, too!
Rosana.
|
Language pair: Spanish; English
This is a reply to message # 56459
|
|
|
