Word: aircrafts
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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 of 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...
...time to shoot that dogma. The new philosophy should be strictly capitalistic: If you want it badly enough, pay for it. In congressional testimony last fall, John Carr, head of the air-traffic controllers' union, pointed out that at Dallas-Fort Worth airport, where the departure rate is 11 aircraft in a five-minute period, airlines were scheduling 16 takeoffs at the very same time. LaGuardia Airport in New York City has become Exhibit A of airline excess. Although the facility can accommodate 75 flights an hour, at times there are more than 100 planes scheduled. Since airlines evidently cannot...
...press a button in your car and link up to a satellite-based guidance system, but you can't do that in a $100 million aircraft. The FAA has scores of time-saving proposals, such as data-link communications and airspace redesign, but it is slogging through the years-long approval process. Congress has for the first time provided significant money, and FAA administrator Jane Garvey has lighted a fire under the agency, but technological improvements should come much faster. The airline industry isn't breathing down the FAA's neck to get global-positioning systems installed, in part because...