Word: air
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Crimson did that. In the last relay, senior Keiko Iwahara had an outstanding lead off leg, while sophomore Christen Deveney, Senior Sandy Stringfellow and Steffen not only kept the lead Iwahara gained, but left the Bulldog relays gasping for air amidst their wake...
Terri Weber's last conversation with her son Pace took place just as his dream of becoming an Air Force pilot was taking off. But she heard something besides excitement in her son's voice. "Our planes are having a lot of mechanical problems," Pace told his mom from his Air Force Academy dorm last June, four days before he was due home on his summer break. His plane's engine had unexpectedly conked out in mid-flight, forcing the instructor to grab the controls and make an emergency landing. "Sometimes it's scary," Pace said over the phone. "When...
...most dangerous plane to fly in the U.S. Air Force today isn't the screaming F-15 Eagle, the Baghdad-bombing F-117 Nighthawk or the thunderous B-1 Lancer. In fact, it's not a jet at all but the first plane fledgling pilots fly--the powerful, propeller-driven trainer flown by cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. Six people--three cadets and their instructor pilots--have died in three crashes of the T-3 Firefly trainer since the planes began flying there in 1995. The T-3's crash record...
That decision is starting to look like a mistake. A TIME investigation, based on dozens of interviews as well as a review of Air Force documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, suggests that the T-3 is a plane too perilous for veteran pilots, much less beginners, to fly. Its single engine has failed 66 times, nearly half of them during flight or at perilous moments like takeoffs and landings. Its brakes are so poor that the Air Force has banned student solo flights out of concern that a novice can't bring the plane to a full...
...introduction to Air Force training was a particular passion of General Merrill McPeak, the service's chief of staff in the early 1990s. McPeak, a fighter pilot who had flown with the Thunderbirds, the Air Force's precision-flying team, is now retired but still flies his own homemade, acrobatic RV-4 aircraft. "The T-41 is your grandmother's airplane," says McPeak of the T-3's predecessor. "Our mission is to train warrior-pilots, not dentists to fly their families to Acapulco...