DHFan & Danny
Re. your #8425 & #8426, this extract from a story by Thurber already anticipated that occurrence:
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber
"WE'RE going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye.
"We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me."
"I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going through!"
The pounding of the cylinders increased: Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketapocketa.
The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted.
"Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg.
"Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander.
"Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned.
"The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of hell!" . . .
"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?"
"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five."
Walter Mitty drove on in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.