Word: crashingly
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Your chances of being involved in a plane crash are pretty slim. By some estimates, they're as low as 1 in 11 million. But should you live through one - possibly as a gesture toward cosmic compensation - your shot at a book deal goes way up. There are two new memoirs out by survivors of plane crashes: Ollestad's Crazy for the Storm (Ecco; 272 pages) and Robert Sabbag's Down Around Midnight (Viking; 214 pages). Starbucks has picked Ollestad's memoir for its book program, and you can see why: plane crashes are usually unknowable, secret events...
...airlines replace Pitot tubes like those aboard 447 with an improved model less prone to icing. While aviation authorities in Europe and the U.S. never made the change mandatory, Air France said it had begun replacing the tubes in May - and agreed to speed up the process following the crash at the demand of pilot unions...
Before he survived the crash, Ollestad had to survive his childhood. His father was a dashing adventurer who pushed his son to feats of preadolescent derring-do as a surfer and skier that are unimaginable by today's nurturing parental standards. It may have been his familiarity with physical danger, and his calmness in the face of it, that saved Ollestad on Ontario Peak. It helped him manage the psychic aftermath too, to put a frame around it. To the Ollestads, life was "raw and wild and wonderfully unpredictable." To be paralyzed by fear of it, by the inevitability...
Sabbag was even unluckier than Ollestad, if that's possible. In 1979 - four months after Ollestad's crash - Sabbag was on an Air New England flight that went down in a trackless forest just short of the airport on Cape Cod. There was no warning. "I breathed in," he remembers, "and when I breathed out I was pulling six Gs." His back and pelvis snapped on impact. He survived - along with the co-pilot and the other seven passengers, though not the pilot - and even learned to walk again. But he never escaped a sense that his life had been...
...months in a sweeping orbit that will carry it around both Earth and the moon; throughout its flight, it will remain attached to its upper stage rocket, separating from it only during its final approach to the moon. The rocket stage will then speed ahead, aiming for a deliberate crash in one of several craters in the south lunar pole in which the LRO's sensors will have detected signs of water ice. The collision will send a debris plume as high as 6.2 miles (10 km) into space and the LCROSS itself, trailing four minutes behind, will fly through...