Word: piloted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...appeal of the Republican candidate whose biography stands in sharpest contrast to Bush's. More than half of Senator John McCain's bio ad details his horrific experience as a Vietnam prisoner of war. There are black-and-white photos of the angry mob that dragged the downed Navy pilot off to 5 1/2 years in prison. There is no reference to policies or programs, only an assertion that McCain has been "taking on the Establishment and defying special interests and never forgetting those heroes with whom he served." (A neat way of referencing heroism without claiming it for himself...
NTSB investigators have detected no evidence of a mechanical malfunction or a weather-related cause for the crash. If there was some mysterious emergency, the response from the cockpit is still baffling. According to the voice recording, a relief pilot identified as Gamil el-Batouti, who normally formed part of the "cruise crew" that spells the pilot and co-pilot during the long, dull hours of an ocean crossing, asked to begin his shift early, barely half an hour into the flight. The captain, 57-year-old veteran pilot Ahmed el-Habashi, agreed to let the highly experienced el-Batouti...
Investigators say the strongest indication of a deliberate act lies in what the airplane did. No alarms signaling equipment breakdown or other emergency went off before the autopilot was disconnected. The steep descent was steady and controlled. The captain would not pull his control yoke up while the co-pilot pushed down. There was no radio mayday and evidently no attempt to signal a hijacking. The plane's final climb may be explained by traditional aerodynamics or by a pilot's desperate effort to regain altitude...
Egyptian officials and el-Batouti's family scoff that the NTSB fashioned a chain of events before there was sufficient evidence to rule out mechanical failure. They rail against the flood of premature news leaks and unsubstantiated, sensational headlines. They vehemently deny the notion that a regularly vetted pilot with 35 years' flying experience would suddenly commit mass murder. At least three pilots and some of the 33 air force officers were in the first-class cabin, but no one tried to overpower el-Batouti in the cockpit...
Amid all the angry disbelief, Egyptian officials had good reason to downplay the suicide theory. It invites speculation that fundamentalist terror groups may have penetrated the state airline. If FBI agents were to conduct interviews on Egyptian soil, it could arouse anti-American nationalists. The idea that a crazed pilot deliberately crashed an EgyptAir plane could wound the country's important tourist industry just as it is recovering from a terrorist massacre that killed 62 two years...