Word: 5a
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...complicated quest for a cargo plane began last year, when a secret Pentagon study pinpointed a critical need for a plane able to carry outsize cargo, such as tanks and helicopters for the new Rapid Deployment Force. The Air Force already had 77 Lockheed C-5A Galaxies, a plane capable of handling large loads but with a checkered history of cost overruns and technical troubles. A design competition for a new carrier was won by McDonnell Douglas with a plane subsequently called the C-17. The Pentagon thus faced three options: to develop the C-17 (whose cost was never...
...issue that led to the decision surfaced in 1968, when Air Force Budget Analyst A. Ernest Fitzgerald told Congress that development costs of the $3.4 billion C-5A transport plane were over budget by $2 billion. In 1970, as the result of what the Air Force described as a reorganization, the Pentagon let Fitzgerald go. The Civil Service Commission found the dismissal improper, and ordered that he be re-employed with back pay. Fitzgerald protested that his new cost analyst job was not equivalent to the old one. In a $3.5 million suit, Fitzgerald charged that Nixon had conspired...
...Pentagon had located three giant C-5A jet transports that were available to fly 60 to 80 tons of supplies each directly to Israel. "Do it now!" he urged. By Sunday morning he agreed that the airlift should be a straightforward American military operation. "We are going to get blamed just as much for three planes as for 300," he told me. He was right...
Bright Star began impressively. Some 500 U.S. military vehicles, ranging from trucks to armored personnel carriers to self-propelled howitzers and 155-mm field guns, rumbled off U.S. Navy transport ships in Alexandria. Waves of C-5A, C-141 and C-130 transports touched down at Cairo West Air Base, ferrying in supplies, equipment and 4,000 U.S. military personnel wearing newly designed desert camouflage fatigues...
With the drag strip dumped, Weinberger preferred simply developing the smaller, so-called common missile-it could be fired from submarines or planes -rather than the more accurate MX; he then switched to a preference for basing the MX temporarily in C-5A transport planes. The wrangling dragged on for months, with the White House growing frustrated over Weinberger's dithering. Finally, Reagan chose to house the MX temporarily in the Titan missile silos while other options are studied further...