Word: electra
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...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...
With Durang's acute perception that "there's something extremely funny about a beautiful woman being silly," a great friendship was born. She gave him class; he gave her sexy roles. Sigourney played a murderous multiple schizophrenic Electra figure in Durang's Titanic, a woman who dates a bisexual analysand in Beyond Therapy. Together they wrote and performed Das Lusitania Songspiel, a deliciously rancid Brecht-meets-Broadway parody, and Naked Lunch, a fake interview with Voracious Starlet Sigourney Weaver that, in expanded form, may soon be a major motion picture. "She is a very strong collaborator," says Durang. "The furthest...
...Electra arrived in Reno that evening. Shortly after midnight, with Heasley at the controls, the plane took off for Minneapolis. After only two minutes in the air, Copilot Kevin Fieldsa radioed the tower: "We've got to get back on the ground . . . vibration in the aircraft." His voice was shaking with the Electra's tremors...
...cabin, George Lamson Jr., 17, who had gone to the Super Bowl with his father, 41, realized that "we were going up and down. And all of a sudden I saw the ground coming up, and the pilot said we were going to crash." The Electra skidded into an open field near an apartment complex, jumped a 20-ft.-wide irrigation ditch, careered into a sales lot for recreational vehicles along Interstate 395 and burst into a ball of fire...