Word: airing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years, until 1994, he headed his own company in Connecticut, Bar-Pat Manufacturing. The business was heavily involved in government contracts, making, among other things, helicopter parts and lightning-ground cables for NASA. In 1988, buoyed by government 8(a) support and solid relationships with the U.S. Navy and Air Force, the company was ranked among the top 100 black industrial and service companies by Black Enterprise. But the end of the cold war exposed Bar-Pat's overreliance on Pentagon orders. "After the Wall came down, they began canceling contracts for the military, and when we went looking...
...telltale "black boxes" proceeded--a ritual so morbidly familiar from the TWA Flight 800 crash two years ago--speculation reached for existing paradigms that would explain the fate of a plane belonging to an airline of sterling reputation. What is known of the cockpit's communications with air-traffic controllers appears to rule out terrorism. But not the terror of mechanical failure. And so the questions were asked. Was it a problem akin to what most probably destroyed TWA 800--a stray spark igniting gases in a fuel tank? Or was it some hazardous, poorly packed cargo like the kind...
...wiring bundle, which spread to the cockpit or to a critical flight control." Such speculation is perhaps inspired by the conclusion of the investigation into the crash of TWA 800 near Long Island on July 17, 1996. That disaster's likely cause: exhaust heat from the Boeing 747's air conditioners transformed its fuel into a hot vapor so combustible that a mere spark, possibly from a frayed wire, touched off the disaster...
...oxygen-generating canisters stowed as freight aboard ValuJet Flight 592 ignited and sent the DC-9 plunging into the Everglades. The generators had been mistakenly marked empty, and the crew never knew that the plane was carrying hazardous material. Could similar undeclared baggage have doomed Swissair 111? In 1990, air personnel discovered undeclared hazardous cargo--usually because it leaked or emitted a smell--on 63 occasions; by last year, that number had ballooned to 349. Shippers are still not required to disclose to air carriers the contents of their parcels--not even if they contain hazardous materials...
...just 15 times in 16 productive major-league years. Think about it. You swing at a tiny ball thrown by a fellow who knows something you don't--where it will whiz past you and at what ferocious speed--and you hit it 350 ft. or more in the air. That is why the homer is baseball's most explosive event, an eruption of sex (the swing) and violence (the wallop) in a gentle sport. And that is why, of the 2,500 or so pitches a healthy player sees each season, so few are driven out of the yard...