Word: onboard
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...sure scared us," said Flight Director Cleon Lacefield. Less than six minutes after launch last week, while the space shuttle Challenger's speed remained well below the velocity of 17,500 m.p.h. that it must achieve to go into orbit, onboard computers shut down one of its three main engines. Reason: sensors were signaling overheating in the fuel pump. Two and a half minutes later, another engine seemed to overheat. "If the right engine had failed ... we would have been in the water," Lacefield said afterward, meaning that Challenger, with its crew of seven, would have fallen in a controlled...
...reported the plane's intrusion by sending a message over their teletypewriter system, which was their only means of contacting their Japanese and American counterparts. They did not. Instead, the Soviet military concluded that the plane was on a spying mission and shot it down, killing all 269 people onboard. To prevent the recurrence of such a tragedy and improve air-traffic communications in the North Pacific, diplomats and aviation officials from Japan, the U.S. and the Soviet Union for the past 18 months have been quietly trying to set up a better system. Last week in Tokyo they reached...
...control over pitch (the nose angle, up or down) of a flying object. But MacCready observed that other flying creatures, like the albatross, achieve stability and pitch control by instinctively making small fore and aft movements with their wings. His solution: the latter-day pterosaur will have an onboard computerized autopilot that will effect similar corrections in the attitude of its mechanical wings. That will take some doing. Explains MacCready: "Nature's creatures are very good at active control. Artificial creatures are very bad. For example, any dumb person can walk across a rough field, but to make a robot...
...passengers. According to Jochem Goovaerts, a spokesman for the Belgian National Rail Company, many stations are too small or poorly staffed to accommodate wheelchair users - and this is unlikely to improve soon. "We are modernizing a few stations and it is taken into account if possible," he says. Even onboard, says Cleon Angelo, 47, a wheelchair user who heads the disabled-rights group Autonomia in Brussels, the disabled can expect "medieval" treatment...
...upbeat assessments given by politicians. Major Kendra Whyatt, Landstuhl's head orthopedic nurse, says she was from the start skeptical about the reassuring tone in Washington. She watched President Bush on television nearly 23 months ago as he declared major combat in Iraq over under a mission accomplished banner onboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California. She quickly dismissed the rhetoric. "The life we live and the life Americans believe are two different things," says Whyatt, 37, who's been an Army nurse for 14 years and moved to Landstuhl with her three small children...