Word: flighted
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...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. We may never find the black box from Air France Flight 447, lost off the coast of Brazil on June 1. But from these crashes, we have something even better. (Watch TIME's video of the rescue of US Airways flight...
...explanations have largely been discounted (no terrorist group has claimed responsibility, and planes are built to shrug off lightning strikes). Most aircraft accidents stem from an unfortunate cascade of events rather than from any single system malfunction. It's becoming clearer that some combination of weather, an unknown flight-control failure and perhaps the crew's inability to respond is probably to blame. The pilots' margin for error at the time was small; in addition to encountering bad (but not extreme) thunderstorms, the plane was operating near its "coffin corner" - a combination of speed and altitude at which it becomes...
...might Flight 447 have been flying at the wrong speed? The latest theory is that one of its three Pitot tubes - external sensors used to measure airspeed - iced up, leading to an inaccurate reading. That would have shut down the aircraft's autopilot - one of those 24 messages indicated that had occurred - and compelled the flight-control computer to shift more responsibility to the pilots. Turbulence would have further whittled away at their safe-speed range. "They might have slowed down inadvertently and flown into a stall," says Hans Weber, an aviation-safety expert at Tecop International...
Meanwhile, French and U.S. experts continue to listen for the elusive pinging of Flight 447's black boxes, sitting somewhere on the floor of the Atlantic. If they are never found, a theory may be the closest we ever get to the truth...
Watch TIME's video of the rescue of US Airways flight...