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Show Coolers fire Needed; fiviation Red Hot' Because of Friction WASHINGTON. Jet and rocket planes flying high in the bitter cold of the stratosphere need cabin coolers cool-ers instead of heaters. Outside the cockpit the air Is 67 degrees below zero. But without a refrigerator, the inside temperature would be 111 degrees at 1,000 miles and hour. Flying at lower altitudes, say 10.-000 10.-000 feet with an outside temperature tempera-ture of 64 degrees, the 1,000-mile-an-hour pilot would be cooking in 242 degrees of heat. Those temperature rises are figured fig-ured only on the heat generated by friction with the air at high speeds. Actually the temperature In the cockpit would be increased further by heat from the sun, the pilot's body and aircraft equipment such as radio. Jet fighters are equipped with a 16-pound refrigerator that can cool the air as much as 500 degrees. It works off the compressed air in the jet engine Itself. The air is expanded ex-panded in a "heat exchanger," which removes about 90 per cent of the heat, and then is used to operate oper-ate a turbine which removes additional addi-tional heat. Such refrigerators cannot be applied ap-plied to rocket planes like the X-l, the first plane to exceed the speed of sound. However, cockpit heat has not been a critical problem with the X-l since it flies at Its top speeds reportedly up to 1.100 miles an hour only a matter of seconds. At its operating altitude the temperature tem-perature is 67 degrees below zero and the air is very thin, which delays de-lays the onset of high friction heat. Heat control will be an important factor in pushing ahead with supersonic super-sonic speed combat aircraft |