Word: aircrafting
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...vulnerable to the 100 or so shoulder-launched, CIA-purchased, Soviet-war-era Stinger missiles still in the hands of the Taliban. The Stingers have one of the greatest records of any killing machine ever invented; a 1989 U.S. Army study found that the Afghans took down 269 Soviet aircraft with them in 340 attempts. But less high-tech weaponry will serve just as well; in 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia, 18 U.S. soldiers were killed, including six Delta Force commandos who tried to rescue airmen from two Black Hawk helicopters downed by rocket-propelled grenades...
...recent article mentioning the possibility of using crop-dusting planes to disperse chemical or biological agents [TERROR WEAPONS, Oct. 1]: I am a 31-year veteran agricultural pilot. Most of us are flying very expensive, turbine-powered aircraft and use global-positioning-system guidance devices. Your report that a crop-dusting manual was found in the belongings of a suspected terrorist was hardly noteworthy. If he happened to luck out and get such an airplane started, I doubt he could get it off the ground. It takes many hours of instruction in this type of aircraft to take off, much...
...Easy: international politics. To conduct the war in Afghanistan, Washington needs allies in the region. Bombers can fly from Diego Garcia and aircraft carriers, but the helicopters vital for close-in work?to say nothing of the soldiers who will do it?generally need bases nearer to the action. So far, the U.S. has made more headway than expected; last week Washington signed a forces agreement with Uzbekistan allowing for the long-term stationing of American troops and aircraft in the Central Asian country. Khanabad, an air base 125 miles north of the Afghan border, has become the staging-post...
...helicopters and MC-130 Combat Talon planes from bases in southern Pakistan and Oman. A military cameraman videotaped the special forces donning fatigues (the camera zoomed in on a photo of New York fire fighters that commandos had packed in their gear to leave at their destinations), boarding aircraft and leaping out in Afghanistan. While a group of commandos seized a dry-lake airstrip some 100 miles southwest of Kandahar, other troops headed to Kandahar itself in pursuit of Omar and one of his command centers. The special forces didn't manage to snare Omar, but Pentagon officials said...
Just then Taliban anti-aircraft guns a couple of miles away opened up. They do not seem to be aiming with any precision - most guidance systems have been taken out by the bombing of Kabul. Instead they seem to be groping blindly through the sky, in the general direction of a plane, which circled unconcerned, high above our heads. A local guerrilla, a sort of village idiot with an RPG (rocket propelled grenade), climbed out the trench and did a clumsy pantomime, pretending in the full view of the Taliban to be shooting down the plane with his rocket propelled...