Word: aircrafting
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...hangar outside Zurich, engineers are paring away at the obstacles to a very 21st century challenge: flying a plane around the world powered by nothing but the rays of the sun. If the Solar Impulse project goes to plan, in 2011 a gangly aircraft with the wingspan of an Airbus A380 and the weight of a compact car will attempt to circle the globe in about a month at an average speed of 43 m.p.h. (70 km/h), landing only five times along...
...optimization. Its 200 ft. (61 m) wingspan is covered with photovoltaic cells, which convert the sun's rays into roughly the same amount of energy needed to light a large Christmas tree. That solar power drives four electric engines, and loads four lithium batteries - a quarter of the aircraft's total weight of 3,300 lbs. (1,500 kg) - which allow the plane to continue flying through the night. Project director and co-pilot André Borschberg says that while labs around the world are developing lighter and more effective batteries, those currently available impose severe limits on the plane...
...from Like a Seed, Wong asks: "After deep loss, what does the heart/ learn that it has not already understood/ about regret? When all light finally/ forsakes a room, do we take the time/ to interrogate the dark, and to what end?" Other poems simmer with sexual energy; an aircraft landing on the tarmac becomes heady foreplay with the "slow lick of its wheels/ against the runway's/ belly...
...were not even having a bus"--Gupta got the idea for his enterprise more than 20 years ago when neighbors begged him for tours after he landed his job at Indian Airlines. "The people from my village thought I was a very big man and could show them the aircraft," he says. "But due to security I could not." In 2003 he bought a 20-year-old Indian Airlines plane "that had met with a small ground incident," cut it up and reassembled it in Dwarka, a fast-growing neighborhood of weed-infested sidewalks and burgeoning middle-class aspirations. Because...
...public and school groups. Poor villagers and students can visit free. "Passengers" check in, receive boarding passes and climb a steep metal staircase to enter the plane. Flight attendants then run them through the safety procedures, serve them snacks and cold drinks and answer questions about how an aircraft works. In a nod to a more innocent time, passengers are free to visit the pilots in the cockpit. "We are fulfilling life wishes," says Gupta. "We want people to have a good time, to inspire them, so that kids see that if they study hard they might become a pilot...