Word: blip
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Scanning a moving blip on the screen that indicated an airliner, Japanese defense command radar operators on the northernmost tip of Hokkaido Island radioed a warning. "You are off course," chided the Japanese. "Turn south." But the message was lost amid crackling static, and Seaboard World Airlines Flight 25 3 A was already 80 nautical miles north of its course. Moments lat er, Pilot Joseph Tosolini was radioing that intercepting MIG fighters were forcing him to land on Iturup, one of the Soviet Kurile Islands. For Tosolini, 214 U.S. servicemen bound for Viet Nam aboard Flight 253A and the crew...
Late last week a magnetometer towed by the U.S.N.S. Silas Bent, a 285-ft.-long floating oceanographic laboratory, transmitted a suspect blip. But more than a score of wrecks litter the ocean floor off the Rat Islands; until a special camera synchronized to a high-powered strobe light can be lowered over the spot, the sea is guarding its secret...
...before Flight 740 began taxiing toward the runway at Los Angeles, it was under the surveillance and guidance of the Federal Aviation Agency. Careful eyes watched the plane turn at the end of the runway, poise, and then reach for the sky. Flight 740 then became a bright, moving blip on a succession of FAA radarscopes as it was guided along a transcontinental airway...
...these and other advanced air-traffic devices, the FAA has begun to install advanced radar traffic-control systems. Computerized alphanumeric systems are already in operation in air-traffic control centers in Atlanta, Jacksonville and New York, electronically printing the flight number, course and altitude next to the appropriate airliner blip on the radarscope. Eventually, FAA hopes to blanket U.S. airspace with alphanumeric coverage, providing a three-dimensional radar picture of all air traffic equipped with the necessary transponders...
Although the system was designed to take some of the pressure off harried FAA controllers, they themselves have found that alpha numerics poses a few problems of its own. To feed information about a flight into the radarscope and attach that information to the appropriate blip, for example, the controller must turn away from the screen to punch buttons on a computer input box, leaving his flights unattended for several vital seconds. In addition, as the alphanumeric data blocks move with their appropriate blips across the screen, they occasionally merge with data blocks from other flights, making both sets...