Word: choppering
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...capturing warlord Mohammed Farrah Aidid, luck ran out when he spotted several armed Somalis firing rocket-propelled grenades at his Black Hawk attack helicopter. Turning the craft broadside to give his gunners a bet- ter shot, Wolcott became a perfect target. A grenade exploded into the side of the chopper. "Super six-one is going down," he yelled into his headset, "Six-one is going in." Those would be his last words. The crash of Wolcott's Black Hawk transformed what had been planned as a textbook operation to decapitate Somalia's most powerful warlord into the longest sustained fire...
...several relief convoys to reach and extricate the trapped Task Force Rangers and -- above all, the capture, beating and humiliation of helicopter pilot Michael Durant. One part of the story has gone largely unreported, however: the 15-hour pitched battle that took place around the wreckage of Wolcott's chopper, an extraordinary display of valor by 99 men under calamitous circumstances. TIME has been told that two of those men who gave their life to protect Durant -- Sergeant First Class Randall Shugart and Master Sergeant Gary Gordon -- have been recommended to receive the nation's highest award for valor...
...glimpses Sylvester Stallone crawling along the underside of a mountain ledge, a zillion feet above sea level. Indeed, most of the movie is devoted to gorgeous Alpine scenery and daredevil feats by its star, who gets to scale icy slopes and trade gouges with villainous John Lithgow atop a chopper perched on a sheer cliff...
Stallone trained for the film on a 30-ft. concrete wall built next to the tennis court at his Beverly Hills home. Despite vertigo, he was drawn into the sport's intoxicating lure: in one shot he was doing upside-down situps, hanging from a chopper, when a crew member noticed that he had no safety belt. Stallone was bothered most by scenes filmed on a seven-story indoor wall at Rome's Cinecitta studios. "That was a lot scarier than the Alps," he says. "There's something about knowing that the floor is there and you could go splat...
...agents helicoptered into Lockerbie shortly after the crash seeking the remnants of McKee's suitcase. "Having found part of their quarry," he wrote, "the CIA had no intention of following the exacting rules of evidence employed by the Scottish police. They took the suitcase and its contents into the chopper and flew with it to an unknown destination." Several days later the empty suitcase was returned to the same spot, where Johnston reported that it was "found" by two British Transport Police officers, "who in their ignorance were quite happy to sign statements about the case's discovery...