Word: pilots
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...Rarely has a disaster-in-the-making been so widely televised-or gracefully avoided-as last week's EMERGENCY LANDING of JetBlue flight 292, whose front landing gear became twisted just after taking off from Burbank, California, en route to New York. Pilot Scott Burke landed safely in Los Angeles by keeping the damaged nosewheel up as long as possible, before dropping it to the tarmac-sparking flames but nothing worse. "I am so glad we got that guy," said passenger Alexandra Jacobs. "I just want to give him a big wet smooch...
...more important than the bottom line to JetBlue has always been safety: the airline lists 'safety' as one of its first five core principles, has a sterling safety record and a rigorous training regimen for crew members. Chief Operating officer Dave Barger, the son of a United Airlines pilot, constantly reinforces that message whenever he speaks to employees. Several years ago the airline hired Steve Predmore, an experienced staffer at the National Transportation Safety Board, to be its head of safety...
...gender. Sure, it would be naive to pretend that her sex would never be an issue. But real women pols are defined by their beliefs, not just their chromosomes. We have no idea what Allen stands for; she just stands against the obtuseness of men. In the pilot, she threatens military force to save a Nigerian woman from being stoned for adultery; Templeton sniffs that she's wasting political capital on "a lady who couldn't keep her legs together...
Maybe, someday, President Allen, who seems headed for success in her fictional world at least. At the end of the pilot, she gives a speech so melodramatically stirring that even Templeton's Grinchy heart swells three sizes bigger. Perhaps a year from now she'll be just another tall, telegenic politician who made it to the Oval Office, needing neither to prove nor apologize for her femininity. Let's just hope she never...
Hanks isn't the first to discover that there's a difference between rapture and rigor. The late Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13, said that the very thing that qualified astronauts to fly to the moon--a certain engineer's detachment from the outrageousness of the undertaking--disqualified them to speak about it terribly lyrically. Hanks, with lyricism to burn, decided to make the most of his astronomical talents...