Word: craft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There is enough new country music around just now to make it seem like a 365-day spring down in Nashville. There is music of anger (Steve Earle) and oddness (Lyle Lovett), music full of craft and winning ways like the tunes on a Randy Travis album. But, with the exception of the wondrous O'Kanes, the sounds in the country air do not abound with enigma. Country has traditionally run to chill depths, though. When Patsy Cline sang Walking After Midnight, she found a lonesomeness whose locus was closer to the soul than the heart. When the Cowboy Junkies...
There I was in the cockpit, hurtling toward the coast of Libya at 500 m.p.h. My mission: to drop a couple of 100-lb. Maverick missiles on a terrorist training camp near the Libyan port of Benghazi. My craft: the new supersecret F-19, a plane so hard to pick up on radar that I felt sure I could swoop in and blast Gaddafi's buddies without getting shot down myself. Suddenly, I saw something that shattered my composure. High over my stubby left wing, a Soviet-built MiG-25 Foxbat fighter was headed my way. Did the enemy know...
...admit that it exists. Although the Air Force is about to unveil its B-2 Stealth bomber, deep secrecy surrounds the smaller but equally advanced F-19, also known as the Stealth fighter. Even so, aviation buffs who study the Pentagon know a great deal about the covert craft. Novelist Tom Clancy featured it in his best seller Red Storm Rising, and Testor Corp. is selling detailed plastic-model F-19 kits for $9.50 each. Best of all, MicroProse, a software company based in Hunt Valley, Md., has produced a $69 computer program that lets would-be cold warriors...
...such hyperpituitary passages, On the Waves opens with a comparatively terse Venetian scene: "In the churning wake of a motorboat from one of the luxury hotels, the gondola bobbed with graceful disequilibrium. The tall, thin, handsome man sitting in the gondola gripped the sides of the small wooden craft and said to his seven-year-old daughter, 'Hold on.' He thought, Gondolas are atavistic." Never mind that adjectives here are pulling more weight than they ought to bear. The real problem is the terminal apercu. Nothing that follows in this brief, intermittently charming story about a man and his daughter...
...primarily on military and scientific missions. When Basler gets his hands on one that has been well maintained, he first lengthens the fuselage by 40 inches, replaces the original transverse spar supporting the wings with a newer, stronger one and adds NASA-designed wing tips to improve the craft's aerodynamics. Next come modern instruments, radar and communications equipment for the cockpit and then two 1,420-h.p. Pratt & Whitney turboprop-jet engines. Since January, Basler has filled orders for four jet-style DC-3s from air-freight companies. Demand has been so strong that he plans to build...