Word: aloftness
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...American Airlines DC-10 taking off from Chicago lost its left-wing engine, tearing out its hydraulic lines; the plane crashed, killing 273. The I.A.P.A. won a federal court order that forced the FAA to ground the entire DC-10 fleet for inspection. The planes were inspected and sent aloft again five weeks later...
...beamed to a worldwide TV audience of 700 million, the $15 million "opera-ballet" by French advertising whiz Jean-Paul Goude featured Scottish pipers and Senegalese drummers, a white bear skating on an ice rink carried by Soviet sailors, and a contingent of Chinese pushing bicycles and holding aloft a banner that read WE SHALL CONTINUE...
Take Ghostbusters II, for example. Once again the psychomagnotheric slime is flowing in Manhattan. Once again spooks are aloft among the other pollutants in its atmosphere. Once again paranormal phenomena (this time in the service of Vigo, a sometime Carpathian tyrant, whose spirit inhabits an antique portrait) have singled out Dana (Sigourney Weaver) for special attention. Once again the old team of exorcists -- wisecracking Venkman (Bill Murray), absentminded Egon (Harold Ramis), earnest Ray (Dan Aykroyd) and stouthearted Winston (Ernie Hudson) -- is ready to deploy its pseudo science in the service of exorcism...
...times, Tiananmen looked like the site of a corporate jamboree: supporters of the hunger strikers paraded around the square, their placards and signs bobbing up and down, proclaiming the presence of CAAC (China's civil airline), CITIC (China's largest investment company) and PICC (people's insurance company). Held aloft beside them were the ubiquitous signs inscribed sheng yuan (support the students) or HUNGER STRIKE -- NO TO DEEP-FRIED DEMOCRACY. Other signs had a distinctly American provenance. I HAVE A DREAM, said one, echoing Martin Luther King Jr. Another amended the words of Patrick Henry: GIVE ME DEMOCRACY OR GIVE...
Come December, NASA plans to use a shuttle to send aloft the Hubble Space Telescope. The so-called ST will fly above the earth's atmosphere, whose turbulence limits the clarity of astronomical photos taken from the planet's surface. The ST's forte will thus be the sharpness of its pictures, which astronomers hope will help answer long-standing questions about the structures of distant galaxies and mysterious pinpoints of light called quasars, and about whether other stars have planets similar to earth...