Word: copiloting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...World War II. Robert Lansing is the central figure-a flying general named Savage, who can spit 220 nails a minute. "I'm going to make you lay square eggs," he told one of his pilots last week. "I'm going to hand you a copilot who's all thumbs, a bombardier who can't hit his plate with his fork, a navigator who can't find his own feet...
...those days, we knew when the departure was, but the return was always uncertain," recalls Arturo Costa, a retired pilot with Uruguay's Pluna Airline. "Sometimes we had to leave the copilot behind to make room for an extra passenger." The flying is still often on a wing and a prayer. A few Latin American airlines have jets and turboprops. But most of them make do with aged DC-3s and hand-me-down DC-6s and Constellations, rigged to haul everything from cattle to campesino settlers on colonization projects...
...continent. More fearsome are the 20,000-ft. Andes, stretching the length of Latin America. On the 30-minute hop from La Paz to one remote mountain town, pilots of Bolivia's Lloyd Aéreo line regularly thread their way through clouded-in peaks with the copilot calling out seconds on his trusty wristwatch. And then, there are the airports. More than 80% of Latin America's 1,085 airports lack permanent night landing lights; some 75% have no control towers, radios or paved runways; and only five fields on the entire continent boast a complete instrument...
...only two of its three engines. No less impressed were the Peruvians, chief among them President Fernando Belaunde Terry, an amateur pilot with considerable time in light planes. Flying out from Lima for a demonstration ride over the Andes, Belaunde was soon in the cockpit and edging into the copilot's seat to see for himself how the big jet handled...
...Diego felt ground fire thumping through his craft, ejected himself seconds before the plane tumbled to earth. An American search helicopter out of Vientiane spotted the downed pilot at the edge of a clearing, but it was driven off by Communist fire that wounded the chopper's copilot. The Pathet Lao radio later announced that Klusmann had been taken prisoner...