Word: crafting
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Drifting lazily to earth under its canopy of three red and white parachutes, the Apollo spacecraft hit the gentle Pacific swells northwest of Hawaii just 4½ miles off the bow of the recovery carrier New Orleans. The only visible problem aboard the craft as it returned from its historic space rendezvous with a Soviet Soyuz was minor. Some of the parachute shrouds caught on the Apollo's nose and capsized it; that left Astronauts Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand and Donald ("Deke") Slayton hanging face down from the straps holding them in their contour-fitted couches for several minutes...
...filling with what the astronauts described as a "brownish-yellow gas" as it plunged through the 24,000-ft. level. Scarcely able to breathe, the spacemen choked through the harrowing four-minute descent. After the splashdown, they struggled for another five minutes, while suspended upside down in the capsized craft, to get at oxygen masks, stowed in a hard-to-reach spot behind their couches. Brand, whose mask fit poorly, passed out; he revived a minute or so later when Slayton and Stafford clapped the mask tightly over his face...
...Maryland. Jack has begun to taste the pleasures of such perks as flight in the presidential helicopter. Recently, in fact, Jack slung his 6-ft. 1-in. frame into the helicopter seat that is normally reserved for the Commander in Chief. A moment later his father boarded the craft, looked down at his son, and growled affectionately, "You're not the President yet." Jack sheepishly gave up his seat as a Ford aide on board quipped, "It's all yours for only 270 electoral votes...
...long runways along Jamaica Bay in Queens, visibility was two miles, the ceiling 5,000 ft.-both-well beyond landing and takeoff minimums. The arcs of lightning, terrifying to many air travelers, caused little concern among the air-wise. Lightning slips routinely off the skins of modern air: craft, rarely impairing vital controls or igniting the well-protected fuel tanks. J.F.K.'s radar picked up the thunderstorm's ominous hook-shaped rain cells. Rain itself poses no unusual problem for pilots. Yet real dangers lurked invisibly in this storm's particular pattern of high and erratically shifting...
...Flight 902, a Lockheed Tristar jumbo jet, descended toward the same runway. It was caught in the same turbulence, measured at up to 90 m.p.h. Pilot Clifton Nickerson alerted the tower to the "wind shear and turbulence." Struggling, in his term, to "save it," he prudently pulled the huge craft back into the air and off to a safe landing at nearby Newark Airport. Some of his passengers grumbled about the "poor service...