Word: aircrafting
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There's a palpable sense of fear in General Augusto Pinochet these days. Not that the former Chilean dictator will ever know the terror of the thousands of his countrymen his regime tortured to death in prison cells, or tossed screaming from aircraft high over the ocean. The fear Pinochet knows is the anxiety of the former strongman discarded by history and forced to face justice; to account for himself stripped of his uniform and the power to inflict unimaginable pain on others...
When the marines stripped Lieut. Colonel Odin Leberman of his command of the corps' lone V-22 Osprey squadron, Leberman admitted that he had told his mechanics to falsify maintenance records to make the troubled aircraft look better. The Osprey, despite 18 years of work and a $12 billion taxpayer investment, needed all the help it could get. Two crashes in the space of eight months had killed 23 Marines, aggravating concerns at the Pentagon about the aircraft's reliability as it weighed going into full-scale production. But now, as the Pentagon begins full-blown probes into both...
...Some challenges are to be expected when building a revolutionary aircraft that takes off and lands like a helicopter but cruises like an airplane - at twice a chopper's speed. As pilots like to say, military flight manuals are written in blood. The growing question around the Osprey is whether its rotor design has a tendency to push the aircraft into a roll that quickly turns into a fatal plunge. Such dives "can occur at any time and consequences are exceedingly grave," according to an unreleased General Accounting Office report circulating on Capitol Hill. "The V-22 appears...
...strong that landing in a desert kicks up sand "brownouts" that can blind pilots, and rescuing someone from the sea is made extremely difficult. Marines climbing down ropes from Ospreys in combat simulations aboard ships or oil platforms have to hit the deck and stay there until the aircraft departs or risk being blown overboard. Communications gear aboard the Osprey is so ineffective that the plane cannot efficiently contact other aircraft, nor can it land at some airports without escort planes outfitted with better electronics to guide it safely through the skies...
...starts innocently enough (if anything is innocent in Las Vegas) with arrival at the city's huge and bland convention center. Once inside, two vast halls have been transformed into what resembles a pair of aircraft hangars decorated by a team of demented TV junkies. There are massive stands taken by the major TV producers, such as Paramount, Columbia and Warner Bros. Huge signs feature talk-show hosts flashing blindingly white teeth and hopeful slogans such as "cleared in 80 percent of the country" ("cleared" means sold; loosely translated, the sign is challenging the other 20 percent to jump...