Word: aloftness
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Phone, fax, conference, order -- all from your seat aloft...
What will impress telephone users aloft most, however, is the marked improvement in voice quality. The digital system, which represents and transmits information in strings of 0s and 1s that ensure accuracy, also comes equipped with a built-in computerized noise suppressor. Analog systems, which translate sound waves captured by microphones into electronic representations -- or analogs -- amplify the background noise along with the voice, and wax < and wane depending on atmospheric conditions. Using digital technology, the new phones achieve quality equal to what earthlings get calling across town, even with the faintest signal...
Horror stories are easy to find. Eastern Airlines had a net worth of more than $1 billion when it entered Chapter 11 in 1989. But there was little left for creditors by the time Eastern exhausted $400 million trying to remain aloft before it quit flying last year. Manville Corp. filed a 1982 petition solely to escape $2 billion of liability suits brought by defendants who claimed to have been harmed by the firm's asbestos products. The next year Frank Lorenzo steered Continental Airlines into bankruptcy, allegedly to break union contracts. But the tactic could not save Continental...
...followed events on the ground with interest, for politics kept him aloft. After the aborted coup in August, newly emergent Kazakhstan, where the launch facilities are located, demanded that a Kazakh cosmonaut be put into space. The mission directors complied last October but had to talk a less than thrilled Krikalev into staying in orbit an extra five months to help train the new crew...
...with Kalashnikov rifles. Their eyes are bright with the drug called kat, their fingers quick on the trigger. Makeshift hospitals dot the city; the existing ones were looted long ago. The wounded must bring their own beds, so most end up lying on the floor, a weeping relative holding aloft their intravenous solution -- when it is available. Somali doctors and foreign volunteers move so quickly from patient to patient that trails of blood pattern the floors...