Word: electra
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...July 2, 1937, an aviator took off from Papua New Guinea for Howland Island in the central Pacific. She was on a round-the-world trip when she and her twin-engine Lockheed Electra lost radio contact and vanished into legend. Since that time women have become commercial pilots, paratroopers and even astronauts. Yet the name of Amelia Earhart retains the power to intrigue. Did she assume a new identity? Was she on a secret reconnaissance mission? Did she get captured by the Japanese? Mary S. Lovell shrugs off these theories; her emphasis is on Earhart's life and accomplishments...
...riderless limos are not the only sign that the 1988 Jackson campaign is a far cry from the seat-of-the-pants, roller-coaster operation of 1984. The dilapidated Lockheed Electra turboprop (which later crashed) has been replaced by a DC-9, complete with computers. Schedules, just vague advisories in the last campaign, which ran on Jesse Jackson time (three hours behind all known time zones), are sometimes adhered to. Church choirs warming up the crowd are still crucial, but now so are the hard-nosed strategists busily color-coding districts on wall-size maps. "Eighty-four was a crusade...
...good and a bad name. Even though the music drama ought to be the focus of attention, there has always been a fascination with sets, props and costumes. At a conservative museum like the Met, which has not presented a world premiere since Marvin David Levy's Mourning Becomes Electra in 1967, creativity is necessarily channeled into design. More is more, and the flamboyant Zeffirelli is a perfect symbol of the times. His Turandot works, in part because the fantastic nature of the opera can accommodate his cinematic, cast-of-thousands treatment. But it is close...
...crash at Reno of a Galaxy Airlines Electra that killed 70 people, many of them fans returning to Minneapolis from the 1985 Super Bowl game in San Francisco, turned out to be a horror story of multiple mistakes. NTSB investigators found that on the ground at Reno, the headsets between the ground supervisor and the cockpit did not work, so hand signals were used. After the pilot started two engines, a ground handler discovered that she could not disconnect an air hose used in the starts. The supervisor began frantically signaling the pilots to stop so the hose could...
Trying to determine if the racket came from an engine problem, the captain reduced power on all four engines, although it would have been safer to check one of them at a time. The loss of speed took the Electra close to its stall point, but the first officer was not monitoring airspeed and altitude as he should have been. The plane stalled and struck the ground. The NTSB criticized the lack of crew coordination and concluded dryly, "The captain attempted both to determine the cause of the vibration and fly the airplane simultaneously, which he was unable...