Word: plane
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...families of the slain Stark crewmen struggled to put the tragedy behind them. Last week the remains of 35 of the 37 dead sailors arrived at Delaware's Dover Air Force Base. Under a bruised sky, pallbearers carried the flag-draped coffins from the belly of a cargo plane and into a concrete hangar. After a brief memorial service marked by quiet sobs, the coffins were shipped to grave sites in small towns such as Greeleyville, S.C., and Fitchburg, Mass., all far, far away from the Persian Gulf...
Fittingly enough, last Thursday was Border Guard Day in the Soviet Union, a national celebration that honors the troops protecting the country's sprawling frontiers. Tourists and Muscovites strolling through Red Square that evening looked up to see a small single-engine plane coming in low from the south. It circled the great plaza, barely clearing the red brick walls of the Kremlin and buzzing the Lenin Mausoleum before finally touching down. At about 7:30 p.m. the little craft came to rest on the cobblestones behind onion-domed St. Basil's Cathedral. Bystanders scattered. Police gaped in astonishment. Official...
...plane, a blue-and-white Cessna Skyhawk 172, stepped Mathias Rust, 19, a computer operator and amateur pilot from Hamburg, West Germany. While the authorities debated what to do with him, Rust coolly signed autographs for the crowd, adding the words HAMBURG-MOSCOW. Shortly afterward he was taken away by police. Said a 24-year-old Muscovite who saw the pilot step from his craft: "People did not know what had happened. Something this unusual does not happen every...
Brindel, who was not on the bridge but in the combat information center one deck below, still expected the plane to pull away. The ship's monitors gave no indication that the pilot had locked his targeting radar on the slow-moving frigate, a necessity before launching a missile...
...John Lehman points out that although the Sheffield was destroyed by a single Exocet, the Stark, with a more durable superstructure and redundant protective systems, was hit by two missiles and still "sailed home under its own steam." Moreover, since the U.S. frigate was blindsided by a supposedly friendly plane, its defensive systems were never tested. "This is basically a weird exception," says Michael MccGwire, a naval intelligence specialist at the Brookings Institution. "Under normal circumstances the Stark would have blown the aircraft...