Word: choppered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Viet Nam veteran who had been shot down seven times on chopper missions, Meeker, 33, had secretly and uneventfully flown a total of eight refugees out of Czechoslovakia on two other occasions, the second only two days earlier. His third trip, as he recounted to TIME Correspondent Christopher Byron, was less routine. Accompanied by a friend, he took off from Munich's Riem Airport in a rented Bell JetRanger helicopter. Avoiding radar detection by sometimes flying as close as 3 ft. to the ground, he crossed the West German border, passed through neutral Austria and at 150 m.p.h. whipped...
...cabin. An instant later, the girl's mother also stumbled, apparently wounded. Kobrzynski sprinted 100 ft. down a grassy hill to help her. At that moment a bullet shattered Meeker's left elbow and hit a rib, a second slammed into the main combustion chamber of the chopper's turbine and a third struck near the fuel tank. "They're aimed shots," Meeker remembers thinking. "In five seconds we'll all be dead...
...help him, Meeker raced for the Austrian border four miles away. Blood from his wounds made his maps unreadable, and the damaged turbine gulped twice as much fuel as it was supposed to. Luckily, Meeker knew his way through the difficult terrain and dangerous wind currents. He set the chopper down where he had landed many times before, next to a hospital at Traunstein, 15 miles inside West Germany. He had 80 seconds of fuel left...
Accompanied by a second helicopter flying as gunship, the chopper lifted off its pad and headed for Beirut. The chosen route was along the border between Lebanon and Syria, so that radar scanners in either country might assume that the two helicopters came from the other side and were flying a routine mission. Meanwhile, other choppers with a back-up team aboard flew over the Mediterranean toward Lebanon; they would land near Beirut if the first team was discovered and shot down...
Advances in metallurgy and aerodynamics make such disasters much less likely today. NASA's Ohio windmill, for instance, borrows directly from helicopter design. Like a chopper's rotor, the 2,000-lb. blades can be "feathered" (or turned on their axes), by manual control; they will continue to whirl at a steady 40 r.p.m. even as the wind varies. In future NASA models, chip-sized computers developed for spacecraft will monitor the performance of the windmills and automatically command them to adjust to wind changes...