Word: craft
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...central daylight time), as the DC-10 cruised at 33,000 ft. above the tiny town of Alta, Iowa (pop. 1,720), it was jolted. Passengers heard an explosion at the plane's rear, then felt the huge craft shake and pitch downward. In Row 11 of the economy section in front of the wings, Lori Michaelson was traveling with her husband and three children. "I could see the stewardesses looked kind of panicky," she recalled later. That was understandable. One of them had been knocked to the floor...
...cockpit, however, Haynes was describing a far more dangerous situation to regional air-traffic controllers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. One minute after the explosion, he radioed that his craft had developed "complete hydraulic failure." That meant the crew could no longer control the rudder, elevators, wing flaps and ailerons that steer the jet. Too massive to be manually manipulated, these control surfaces are normally powered by fluid pumped by pressure from the jet engines through a series of stainless-steel tubes that snake throughout the aircraft. Since each of the plane's three redundant hydraulic systems is powered...
...then Haynes had managed to guide his disabled craft toward Sioux City in a wide descending spiral of right turns. "We're going to make an emergency landing in Sioux City," he warned passengers over the intercom. "It's going to be rough." He paused. "As a matter of fact, it's going to be more than rough...
That first movie raised the craft of torture to a low art. Expect no less in LW2, directed by Richard Donner and written by Jeffrey Boam. This installment features a surfboard decapitation, death by carpenter's nail gun, a bomb wired to a very sensitive seat (plot device lifted from Elmore Leonard's novel Freaky Deaky), and reduction of the Afrikaaner diaspora by about one-half. As Riggs tells Murtaugh, "We're back! We're bad! You're black! I'm mad!" Mad to the max. Riggs may not know how to spell apartheid, but he knows whom he hates...
Admittedly, we have gained knowledge about our planet and our solar system, but the question is by no means settled as to whether we could have accomplished the same using robot craft...