Word: inspector
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...British aviation expert remained suspicious of the botched Osaka landing as a possible cause of Flight 123's crash. William Tench, recently retired chief inspector of accidents at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, said he knew of cases in which it took three years before a crack became visible after an aircraft was heavily jolted. Japan's Ministry of Transport promptly ordered that the tail areas of all 747s registered in that country be re-examined, with special attention to the link holding the fin to the fuselage...
...reliability issues, sometimes bringing in a whole car and lifting it up on a hydraulic platform to get a firsthand look. Likewise, the company's 68,000 workers are encouraged to make suggestions for improving quality in regular factory-floor meetings. Late last year, Yu Seung Byul, a quality inspector in Hyundai's Asan factory in Korea, invented an improved method for detecting missing bolts and brackets in hard-to-see nooks inside the car frame. He and his managers had spent weeks debating how to solve the problem. Then, says Yu, "I woke up one morning, looked...
...comfort programming can make studio accountants uncomfortable. Starsky and Hutch did O.K. as a Ben Stiller--Owen Wilson romp last year, but many TV blowups--like The Mod Squad, My Favorite Martian and Steve Martin's Sgt. Bilko--tanked. (Then again, Martin bringing his spin to Inspector Clouseau in this summer's remake of The Pink Panther--that has us smiling already...
Clues pointing to French involvement were not hard to find. The bombing seemed to have been organized with all the bumbling finesse of an Inspector Clouseau rather than the cool efficiency of a John le Carré operative. Following the explosion, New Zealand investigators discovered a distinctive gray-and-black dinghy floating in the harbor near the wreck of the trawler. The dinghy, they found, was of a type not sold in New Zealand, though it is commonly used by the French navy. Oxygen tanks used by divers that were washed up on a nearby beach also bore French registration marks...
...Unkindness of Ravens (Pantheon; 245 pages; $15.95) by Ruth Rendell marries the two disparate strains in her writing: the slow psychological disintegration of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and conventional detection by kindly Chief Inspector Reg Wexford and his younger deputy Mike Burden. The plot involves bigamy and incest and probes the links between feminism and lesbianism. As is almost always true in a Rendell narrative, things are considerably simpler than they at first seem. Her portrait of the killer is a classic Christie-style evocation of narcissistic...