Word: plane
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Once in the air, the young pilot maneuvered Daedalus 88 with a stubby metal joystick on the floor to his right. To decrease the drag on their sprawling invention, the plane's designers had dispensed with the hinged ailerons on the following edges of the wings that normally make turning easier. As a result, Daedalus responded sluggishly, to the stick's movements, making it more difficult for Kanellopoulos to steer a straight course...
That operation had been the longest continuous skyjacking in history, a terror-filled 15-day epic that began with the capture of the plane as it neared the gulf and continued during stops at the Iranian city of Mashhad and the Cypriot city of Larnaca before reaching a seven-day standoff in Algiers. For many of the 31 hostages inside the aircraft, the tipoff to approaching | freedom came when the hijackers began systematically wiping overhead compartments and doorways to erase their fingerprints. Then, following a plan apparently worked out in advance with Algerian negotiators, they quietly left the aircraft...
Basically, what GE did was to painstakingly refine its military designs into a line of passenger-jet engines. Its CF6, currently a popular engine for jumbo jets, was derived from a design initially developed in the late 1960s for the Air Force's giant C-5A cargo plane. The engine was the first to use a high- bypass technique in which a fan, working like a turbocharger in an automobile, pushes large quantities of air past the combustion core to produce much greater thrust. The CF6 turbofan (current cost: $6 million each) has broken the hold Pratt & Whitney had with...
...radical-looking new engine called the UDF, for "unducted fan." With 16 curved fan blades that spin in the open air, the engine looks like a food processor but produces a fuel saving of 40%. McDonnell Douglas has flight-tested the UDF on the prototype for its next midrange plane. But perhaps GE's moment of poetic justice really came last May, when Northwest Airlines, the diehard Pratt buyer, decided to buy 120 of the CFM56 engines. That must have prompted a few smiles at the light-bulb company...
...painting like Battery May 5, 1986 -- black, smudgy figures on a promenade in lower Manhattan, a plunging perspective of lamps on the seawall, a livid yellow sky -- the recession is brusquely contradicted by the surface grid of vinyl tiles; the image struggles to break back from the picture plane but cannot. It is a self-canceling effect but not an interestingly perverse...