Word: piloting
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Last week marked several important dates in the history of space exploration. Forty years ago last Thursday, an unknown 27-year-old Soviet pilot named Yuri Gagarin took flight in the small spherical Vostok capsule. His one-orbit, 108-minute flight made him the first man to travel in space and marked one of the most important events of the 20th century. Twenty years later, also on Apr. 12, the space shuttle Columbia entered space. The 54-hour maiden voyage of the reusable spacecraft signified the dawning of a new age of exploration...
Everyone had a job to do onboard the dying Navy reconnaissance plane when it began to fall out of the sky. The two pilots up front were trying to save the aircraft, while the other 22 crew members in back were trying to destroy what was inside it. Two Chinese F-8 fighters had been tracking the plane closely, too closely, for 10 minutes. The U.S. flyers even recognized one of the pilots, Wang Wei, a notorious hotdogger who one time flew so close to an American plane that he could be seen holding up his e-mail address...
...like a speedboat and a sailboat," said a Navy pilot. "The smaller, more powerful guy has the responsibility to avoid the bigger, slower one." Yet recently, as the U.S. stepped up surveillance flights in response to China's buildup in the area, the Chinese pilots had become more aggressive. "Sometimes they're so close you can see their faces," David Cecka, Aviation Electronics Technician 2nd Class onboard the downed plane, had told his mother. It got so bad that U.S. officials complained. "We went to the Chinese and said, 'Your aircraft are not intercepting in a professional manner. There...
...involved with this thing from the beginning, but he has no desire to stand out." And so it was Bush himself who went before the cameras on Monday to read a statement designed to sound firm but not threatening. The White House had decided not to attack the Chinese pilot for hotdogging near the U.S. plane, and instead called the collision an "accident." "Our priorities are the prompt and safe return of the crew," Bush said, "and the return of the aircraft without further damaging or tampering...
...relations, a small group of China specialists in Washington views the spy-plane incident as the best chance yet to alert the Establishment to Beijing's growing strategic threat to the U.S. "This basically puts a stake through the heart of appeasement," says Edward Timperlake, a former Marine fighter pilot and an author who worked in the Reagan Administration...