Word: airings
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...always that much clearer thousands of feet above the fray. Sometimes, even when everything aboard a $50 million fighter jet works perfectly, the stresses of combat, accumulating slowly and insidiously, can overcome the world's best pilots. That's what happened on July 18 over eastern Afghanistan, when two Air Force officers stumbled into a series of missed signals and blown procedures. The errors combined to send their F-15E screaming into a dark mountainside in a steep, controlled dive at 550 m.p.h., according to an Air Force investigation released last week. (See the top 10 most expensive military planes...
...Pilot Captain Mark (Pitbull) McDowell, 26, and weapons-systems officer Captain Thomas (Lag) Gramith, 27, died in the first crash of an Air Force fighter in Afghanistan since the war began more than eight years ago. Coming near the end of a four-hour combat flight, the crash appears to have been the result of a series of steps, each insignificant in and of itself, but which in combination created a cascade of disaster...
...night of the crash, two F-15Es, which specialize in ground-attack missions, had spent close to three hours supporting grunts near the Pakistan border. But on their way back home to Bagram air base, they decided to practice high-angle strafing runs against 7-ft. dirt mounds in the middle of a dry lake bed. While they wouldn't actually fire their 20mm guns, the pilots had decided to practice one of the Air Force's most dangerous missions - diving toward the ground amid mountains on a dark night. Their heavy night-vision goggles, which work by amplifying existing...
...that danger was imminent. Finally, "expectancy" played a role. The crew had expected to dive for 10 seconds before simulating the firing of their gun. So when the warnings sounded seven seconds into the dive, their reaction times slowed because they believed they still had thousands of feet of air beneath them...
...image makers want to send a message to the public. Which is why, says Andrei Kryukov, a student who asked Putin about his plans for the 2012 elections, he had been steered by Putin's press service and coached for two days before the live show went on the air. Putin's answer to Kryukov's question and one other was clear and direct. Yes, he told the millions of viewers watching the show, he would think about running for President again. And no, nobody should hold their breath for his giving up power...