Word: aztecs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...left outboard engine of the big DC-6 began to pop dangerous orange flames. Unhurriedly, as became his 52 years and his 20,000 flying hours, Pilot Laurens Claude flicked the switches, cutting the bad power plant and feathering its propeller. On her three good engines, American Airlines' Aztec, New York-to-Mexico City luxury liner, purred steadily on course for Dallas, 300 miles southwest...
...into line with the twinkling lights of Love Field's long north-south runway, lowered the wheels and wingflaps for landing. Suddenly the outboard right engine sputtered and died. The two good engines bellowed as he poured power to them to lengthen his glide, but the Aztec was caught-sluggish and vu'nerable-in the drag of her extended landing gear and flaps. "She's a goner." shouted First Officer Robert Lewis. The Aztec's nose went up as she shuddered in a stall. Her left wing dipped and she swirled drunkenly into the corrugated metal...
Pilot Claude, Copilot Lewis, their flight engineer and 15 of the Aztec's 41 passengers escaped from the white-hot pyre. When the wreckage had cooled, an American Airlines ground crewman stood sobbing as he kept count, in a little black notebook, of the bodies carried from the blackened metal. Total: 28. Three days later the heads of eleven major U.S. airlines were feted in Chicago at a luncheon (scheduled long before the crash) to honor commercial aviation's record for safety. Their statistics proved that IQ49, even including the Dallas crash, could still...
Proclaiming her unshaken belief that the bones actually were those of the last Aztec ruler, Eulalia Guzman packed up for another trip to Ixcateopan. The red-faced Bank of Mexico kept its own counsel. One question remained unsolved: Was the hoax the work of a 20th Century man, or had it been perpetrated by some long-forgotten 16th Century prankster...
...document told how Motolinia and a group of Aztec warriors cut the Emperor's corpse down from a tree, smeared it with a paste of herbs and took it hundreds of miles to Ixcateopan, Cuauhtemoc's birthplace. There they buried the Emperor and erected a church above the crypt...