Word: othes
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...north of the smugglers' favorite routes. Last week in Bangor the U.S. Air Force showed off the operations center for a new radar system that can "see" up to 3,300 km (2,000 miles), or nearly ten times as far as conventional radar. Built by General Electric, the OTH (for over-the- horizon) radar system was originally developed to give the U.S. military an early warning of any approaching Soviet bombers. But in these days of easing tensions between East and West, the Pentagon is excited about the role that the radar can play in the war against drug...
Able to cover a swath of sky from Iceland to the northern coast of South America, the OTH radar can monitor a smuggler's plane from soon after it takes off in, say, Colombia until it reaches the U.S. When a technician in Bangor sees an unscheduled flight over the Caribbean, the information will be relayed - to the Pentagon's Joint Task Force Center in Key West, Fla. An Air Force fighter will follow the suspect plane, and officers of the Customs Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration will be alerted to the mystery craft's course so that they...
...echoes as the signals bounce back from distant objects. The range of conventional radar is limited by the earth's curvature, since the signal must follow a straight line. Standard ground-based systems work for about 80 km (50 miles), and airborne equipment for 320 km (200 miles). OTH radar gets around the limit by sending beams up to the ionosphere, an atmospheric layer of charged atoms that begins some 75 km (46 miles) above the earth's surface. The signals are reflected by the ionosphere over the horizon, where they hit objects and bounce back to the ionosphere...
...operation failed when a Mahé airport customs inspector found a weapon hidden in a Froth-Blower's luggage. A gunfight broke out at the airport, in which one mercenary was killed and several oth ers wounded. Desperate to escape, the raiders fought their way to the control tower, guided an incoming Air India 707 to a landing and commandeered the plane. They forced the Air India pilot to fly them 2,500 miles across the Indian Ocean to Durban...
...rejected entries include such kitsch as a house-high steel helmet and a number of handsomely styled columns, pylons, tablets and structures that belong at a world's fair or amusement park. Oth er designs accommodate the thousands of names on various layouts of slabs, blocks and other geometric stones and look depressingly like constructivist graveyards...