Word: aircrafting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Earlier in the week Bush approved a robust arms package for Taiwan, including destroyers, antisubmarine aircraft and diesel-powered submarines, to counter a possible sea blockade by the mainland. But he turned down the most controversial request, for ships equipped with the advanced Aegis battle management radar. Although it was the biggest sale in years, Beijing's outrage displayed somewhat less bellicosity than it is capable of mustering. Bush, however, indicated that he might okay a future Aegis sale unless Beijing reduced its batteries of short-range ballistic missiles aimed at Taiwan. Although a few right-wing critics, already angry...
...There are lots of solutions out there: more runways; higher prices for flying at rush hour; incentives for airlines to use larger aircraft that take up proportionately less space and time in crowded airports; encouraging, or forcing, use of secondary airports; gagging members of Congress who insist on nonstop, cheap flights from Podunk to Major Metropolis; and even (anti-government types should skip this part) reinstitution by the FAA of slots (that is, landing and takeoff rights) at the most delayed airports...
Just as important as the quality and precision of the models was the subject matter. Tamiya and Hasegawa were the only companies that made scale models of Japanese imperial navy vessels. The American companies were squeezing out endless reproductions of the aircraft carrier Enterprise and the battleship Missouri: model kits as cookie-cutterish as the ships they represented. American naval vessels seemed mass produced - Yorktown-class carriers, Iowa-class battleships, Portland-class cruisers. Credit Henry Ford for the assembly lines that won the war. But blame him for the blandness of the fleet. What was the difference between the Enterprise...
...Japanese aircraft carriers and battleships were idiosyncratic, unique, individually laid down in Yokosuka and Shikoku shipyards and fitted with quirky characteristics. Superstructures set too far aft. Smokestacks emanating from the ship's hull. These were the vessels that captured my imagination. For one thing, these ships were all at the bottom of the Pacific, heroically overwhelmed, it seemed to me, by the sheer numbers of nondescript American ships. And the Tamiya Waterline models, with their jeweler's attention to detail and scholar's obsessive historical accuracy, somehow evoked the mystery of these lost ships. The kits didn't bring...
...nation could produce these strange-looking ships? And then, just a few decades later, distribute these wondrous plastic replicas? It has stayed with me ever since as my internal, almost subconscious response to the notion that Japan is a copycat nation: no other country, before or since, ever made aircraft carriers that looked like the Akagi or Shokaku or Hiryu. At the same time, only Japan ever made toys as wondrously byzantine as the model kits of those ships...