Word: plane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...premonition came disastrously true. Half an hour after lifting off from New York City en route to Cairo, the Boeing 767-300 ER dropped from 33,000 to 16,700 ft. in less than 40 sec., hurtling downward at nearly the speed of sound. For a moment, the plane seemed to catch itself and climbed upward for more than a mile before peeling into a final fatal dive. At 10,000 ft., radar records suggest that the plane broke apart, sprinkling shards of the 767 and its human cargo into the waters off the Massachusetts coast. The wild ride lasted...
...more than a mile, then fell towards the waters off the Massachusetts coast. Speculation on that unusual flight pattern now centers on some sort of human, rather than technical, problem with the flight. Especially now that the flight data recorder, recovered earlier in the week, revealed that the plane had been taken off autopilot shortly before the crash -- and that both engines were shut off seconds before the 767 made its final, fatal descent. "Someone on that airplane was trying to make that airplane crash and they succeeded," a former United Airlines pilot with 7,000 hours flight time...
...weeks submerged under 250 feet of salt water could prove difficult. The NTSB will probably need translators since the last words of the Egyptian flight crew were likely in Arabic. And if in fact there was no mechanical problem, what went wrong? Did an intruder succeed in wrecking the plane? Or did the pilot himself somehow send the plane down, either through some kind of error or even deliberately? In the end, the questions may outnumber the answers provided by the cockpit audio...
...easier when your predecessor isn't around. Coup leader General Parvez Musharraf on Wednesday announced that former prime minister Nawaz Sharif will be charged with conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping. The charges, which arise from the alleged attempt by Nawaz to stop the general's plane from landing in Pakistan after firing him as commander of the Pakistani military, carry the death penalty. "This appears to be General Musharraf?s solution to the problem of what to do about Nawaz," says TIME New Delhi correspondent Maseeh Rahman. "The general had to find a way to keep the well-connected...
...will Pakistanis respond to the charges? "The allegation that Nawaz tried to stop General Musharraf's plane from landing in Pakistan will be taken very seriously by Pakistanis," says Rahman. "After all, that would have forced it to land in India, which would have put the head of Pakistan's armed forces into the hands of their enemy." And it's certainly a more effective means of neutralizing any political challenge from Nawaz than charging him with corruption would have been. After all, the idea that politicians are corrupt is hardly considered breaking news in Pakistan...