Word: choppers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Wessex and Scout helicopters that swing back and forth across the terrain, deploying soldiers to hidden observation posts. On the ground it is another matter. Road travel by the 550 British troops in the area is so risky that it has been abandoned: the army either moves about by chopper or does not move at all. Disgruntled British officers claim that their troops are outgunned by I.R.A. forces, which are equipped with Browning heavy machine guns that command a range of 3,000 meters, v. the 1,000 meters covered by the British standard-issue general-purpose machine...
...deliveries to and from the fort -from guns to garbage-are made by chopper. Army patrols outside the front gate are bizarre affairs in which squads of soldiers dart down the street, scurrying from one doorway to the next in a breathless circuit around the square, then scramble back inside the fort...
...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...