Word: airport
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...call from the cockpit startled me out of a fitful sleep in the cramped cabin of the chartered Southern Air Transport jet. We had left New York's City's John F. Kennedy Airport 14 hours earlier with a crew of six and four passengers, bound for Armenia with almost 85,000 lbs. of medical supplies from AmeriCares, a nonprofit organization based in New Canaan, Conn. In a race for time, we were the first private American group to be airborne with emergency relief for the earthquake victims...
...Soviet aircraft, running low on fuel, was asking for clearance to land at Zvartnots airport in Yerevan. I heard someone calling out numbers over the radio in Russian, but his Armenian accent made them difficult to understand. The Soviet pilot was obviously having trouble comprehending the response too, and asked ground control several times to repeat the coordinates...
...with a large Stars and Stripes, an Algerian transport plane, a commercial Austrian airliner -- in all, about 15 foreign planes, not counting a regular fleet of Soviet Ilyushin 76s and Tupelev 154s. Hundreds of dark-clad figures milled about. The usual tight military control that exists at every Soviet airport seemed to have all but broken down...
...been given to the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. Over the weekend the first U.S. cargo plane arrived in Yerevan, carrying rescue experts and sniffer dogs. On Sunday tragedy struck again: a Soviet military transport plane carrying soldiers to help rescue victims crashed at the airport in Leninakan, killing 79 people...
...become Gorbachev's most explosive domestic issue because other restive Soviet republics, from Estonia on the Baltic to Georgia in the Caucasus, are watching how he deals with the fiercely nationalistic Armenians. The Armenians are likely to have taken note of the emotion in his voice at Kennedy Airport when he spoke of the urgency of helping victims of the earthquake. This tragedy thus gives Gorbachev an opportunity to present himself as a caring leader who seeks to heal rather than divide...