Word: nearing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Flight 182 left Los Angeles at 8:30 a.m., flying southward along the Pacific, tracked first by radar controllers at Los Angeles, then by similar Federal Aviation Administration controllers at Miramar Naval Air Station near San Diego. A couple of miles after the PSA plane turned east over Mission Bay, the controllers at Miramar passed control to the Lindbergh tower. The tower assigned Runway 27 for landing. That would require the 727 to continue eastward, flying parallel to the runway, then turn south and finally back toward the west for the touchdown...
...ground, chaos spread through a neighborhood of neat small homes and tall palm trees. The bulk of the airliner smashed into houses near Nile and Dwight streets, the more intact remnant of the Cessna about six blocks away. The terrified PSA passengers trapped in the plummeting craft died instantly on impact with the earth. "It was a nonsurvival crash," one investigator said. Indeed, the carnage left in the wake of the fireballing metal fuselage gave mute testimony to that. Scraps of clothing hung from telephone poles. Parts of a briefcase were found here, fragments of computer printout papers there...
Police poking through the debris found few pieces of blackened scrap larger than two feet long or wide. An exception was an aircraft sign saying WELCOME. Near by two scorched dogs lay dead on their backs. All the coroner's crews could do was pick up parts of bodies and put them into yellow plastic bags. Said Deputy San Diego County Coroner Warren Chambers: "It may be many days before we will be able to match parts or even determine how many bodies we have...
That record, however, is no reason for complacency. The number of reported "near misses" of aircraft in flight has been increasing sharply, to 384 last year-and the safety experts believe that only a small portion of such perilous passings are reported. The overwhelming majority do not involve commercial airliners. But as the San Diego crash illustrates, the loss of life is large when the near miss involving a big passenger jet turns into an actual collision...
...time limits on how long he would like to be president, and under his guidance Yale seems to have the opportunity to get back on its feet. How Giamatti will manage to exploit his academic expertise is yet another question. He plans to return to the classroom in the near future, time permitting, but this tradeoff seems to be one of his most agonizing problems. It is not a purely selfish motivation--his students are his primary concern, but with all of Yale's financial problems, a balance will no doubt be hard to achieve...