Word: crashing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Grudgingly, painfully, the swamp that swallowed Flight 592 is surrendering parts of the jet, as well as human remains, but it has not yielded an exact answer to what caused the crash. Investigators, wading through thick heat, razor-sharp saw grass, toxic jet fuel and the almost cartoonish threat of alligators, first speculated that the 27-year-old DC-9 was struck down by some combination of age and poor maintenance. Now they are focusing on a new culprit: the 50 to 60 oxygen generators believed to have been stowed--perhaps mistakenly--in the forward cargo hold of the aircraft...
Every time a commercial airliner meets up with disaster, the flying public is forced to confront dangers it never even knew existed--remember microbursts and wind shear?--and the airlines scramble to alter policies, upgrade technology or retrain their pilots. In the case of the May 11 crash of ValuJet Flight 592, which plunged into the muck of the Everglades and killed all 110 people on board, the safety concerns are so varied--and the questions emerging about the role of the Federal Aviation Administration in regulating low-cost airlines so troubling--that it may be a while before passengers...
...been empty; they may have merely exceeded their shelf life. Though no generators have yet been found, pieces of the salvaged wreckage, including a singed cockpit life preserver and two sooty steps from near the cockpit, indicate there was a fire on board the plane. And minutes before the crash, pilot Candalyn Kubeck told the Miami tower the cockpit was filling with smoke. Company president Lewis Jordan, a former head of Continental Airlines, has cautioned against a "rush to judgment," but told TIME late last week that to his knowledge, ValuJet was not authorized to carry the generators. Another possibility...
...crash site rescuers were hampered by the inhospitableness of the Everglades--and the plane's flammable oil slick. Said Miami Fire Lieut. Luis Fernandez: "We've had to pull the airboats out of the water. It's not like the ocean; there's no water circulating, so there's no way for the fuel to dissipate. What we're having to do is land on high ground and then have our rescuers slush through four feet of water." With that kind of contact come the natural hazards of the swamp: alligators and snakes...
...laboratories in Sandwich, England, were testing the drug, known to help open up blood vessels, for the treatment of chest pains. Study participants said it didn't do anything for their heart muscle but did seem to add extra zip to their sex life. Pfizer researchers quickly undertook a crash course in something they had never addressed scientifically: the process by which certain enzymes in the body help trigger or turn off an erection. As they plowed through the existing research on impotence, they realized that in sildenafil they had a potential blockbuster on their hands...