Word: aircrafting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...More German soldiers are now being sent to Afghanistan in the run-up to the elections in August, bringing the total number to 4,200 by late summer. There are also plans to send 300 more German troops to the country to help support NATO's deployment of surveillance aircraft...
...participating in the Proliferation Security Initiative, which aims to block suspected shipments of weapons and nuclear matériel from states such as North Korea, Iran and Syria. The program has had its successes. Last September, acting on intelligence from the U.S., India denied overflight rights to an aircraft that took off in Burma and was thought to be transporting North Korean missiles or other weaponry to Iran. The flight never made it to Tehran, U.S. intelligence officials say. But until very recently, even South Korea hesitated to embrace interdiction of North Korean boats. And no one in the region...
Until debris from the missing aircraft began to surface on June 6, Air France Flight 447 and its 228 passengers and crew seemed to have vanished into thin air. There were no last-minute distress calls from the cockpit; just 24 automatic satellite messages--some indicating major system failures - relayed from the stricken plane to Air France maintenance headquarters. Even now, as recovery teams retrieve flotsam and victims' bodies, the black boxes that recorded the flight's final moments remain as much as 2 miles (3.2 km) deep. (See pictures of the search for Flight...
...four-year-old Airbus A330. Bloggers and aviation experts flit from theory to theory. A terrorist attack? A lightning strike? Some catastrophic technical failure? The first two explanations have largely been discounted (no terrorist group has claimed responsibility, and planes are built to shrug off lightning strikes). Most aircraft accidents stem from an unfortunate cascade of events rather than from any single system malfunction. It's becoming clearer that some combination of weather, an unknown flight-control failure and perhaps the crew's inability to respond is probably to blame. The pilots' margin for error at the time was small...
...might Flight 447 have been flying at the wrong speed? The latest theory is that one of its three Pitot tubes - external sensors used to measure airspeed - iced up, leading to an inaccurate reading. That would have shut down the aircraft's autopilot - one of those 24 messages indicated that had occurred - and compelled the flight-control computer to shift more responsibility to the pilots. Turbulence would have further whittled away at their safe-speed range. "They might have slowed down inadvertently and flown into a stall," says Hans Weber, an aviation-safety expert at Tecop International...