Word: airness
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...adolescent boys admire the can, Britney Spears gyrating for the camera, those stupid dancing bears. In fact, Pepsi has advertised during the Super Bowl for 23 consecutive years. So why is the company skipping this year's big game, leaving the airwaves to its salivating rival, Coke, which will air two different spots, including one starring the incredibly popular characters from The Simpsons? (See the best and worst Super Bowl commercials...
...Suriname, on a Cold War relic called the Doomsday Plane. Forged in the 1970s by Boeing, it was designed to stay aloft even in the midst of nuclear war. It's an airborne Pentagon. The plane is so heavy that it needs refueling in midair on long flights. The Air Force crew aboard told me that on occasion, the fuel nozzle from the floating tankers has smashed through the pilots' windshield like an angry space creature. It's one of a handful of planes coated with nuclear-attack shielding and capable of emitting launch codes to all U.S. missile silos...
...Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. He ushered Gates through a hangar outfitted as NATO's new cyber-command-and-control center. One of his staff whispered, "An enormous well-oiled machine for eatin' bad guys." In another hangar, Gates got a glimpse of the fledgling Afghan air force and stepped into the cockpit of an old Russian Mi-17 attack helicopter. "Don't you love the irony of Gates in the pilot's seat of an Mi-17 that he was getting Stingers to shoot down?" said his spokesman Geoff Morrell...
...medevac him," a Pentagon aide told me. "The soldier lived. But Gates was furious." He also heard that while wounded soldiers in Iraq were guaranteed a medevac within the "golden hour," in Afghanistan they could wait as long as 1 hr. 41 min. Gates saw that there were Air Force helicopters sitting on the tarmac at the Bagram base, on call for search-and-rescue missions to recover downed airplanes - something that hadn't happened in years. Why couldn't they be used to evacuate soldiers? It was a classic case of interservice rivalry getting in the way of practical...
...list of mindless bureaucratic obstacles that were hampering the war effort was dizzying. For example: military officers complained that there were not enough drones, Predators and unmanned reconnaissance in the air to help target insurgent cells. The holdup? Air Force pilots are taught to fly real planes, not drones. Each pilot costs about $1 million to train. And yet some staff sergeants in the Army had started operating the drones at a fraction of the price, with far fewer crashes. "If the Army is doing it safer and cheaper and able to produce more pilots faster, why aren...