Word: flighted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...what might have been an effort to blunt charges of both favoritism and publicity seeking, NASA used the same occasion to announce that Idaho schoolteacher Barbara Morgan, a backup for Christa McAuliffe on the doomed Challenger mission, would be assigned to a flight as well. That did not satisfy all naysayers, however, and their criticism was not completely unfounded. Glenn is hardly the only older pilot the agency had on hand. Story Musgrave, a six-time shuttle astronaut, retired from the astronaut corps in 1996 at age 61 when NASA told him he was too old to fly. John Young...
...announcement that the world's most famous astronaut would return to space next October, 36 years after becoming the first American to orbit the earth, was greeted with pleasure, amazement and some skepticism. Critics argued that the flight was merely a public relations stunt; NASA insisted it was motivated by good, hard science. Glenn, while officially echoing NASA, added a reason of his own: "I see this," he said, "as another adventure into the unknown...
Your report on the investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 [NATION, Dec. 22] referred to the Federal Aviation Administration's "sometimes contradictory mandate [which] requires it to tend both the airline industry's safety and its financial health." The FAA has not had a "dual mandate" since October 1996, when legislation stripping that anachronism took effect. The FAA is not responsible for the financial state of the aviation industry, and financial concerns were not a factor in the safety actions the agency took following the TWA crash. ELIOT BRENNER, Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs Federal Aviation Administration Washington
...Versailles, the first aeronauts--a sheep, a rooster and a duck--take to the sky in the Montgolfier brothers' hot-air balloon. On Nov. 21, Jean Francois Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes drift over Paris in a Montgolfier, achieving the first manned free flight (2). Asked what good are balloons, U.S. envoy Ben Franklin replies, "What good is a newborn baby?" The English Channel is crossed in 1785, and ballooning soon becomes the stuff of daredevils (3). But in 1794 the world's first air force is born: warring France uses tethered balloons to observe and direct...
...what struck Flight 826 was so-called clear-air turbulence, which occurs when there is scarcely a puff of cloud in a pilot's path. CAT can be caused by a lot of things, including a change in direction of the jet stream, a clash of opposing air masses or a swirl of wind rising off a mountain. Not only is the phenomenon invisible, both to the eye and to radar, but it can also be highly localized, lurking in a patch of sky as small as 1,000 ft. across. When CAT hits, says retired United Airlines captain Andy...