Word: plane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...going on?" or "What's happening?" Then the same voice urges, "Pull with me! Pull with me!" Twenty-seven seconds into the dive, the horizontal elevators on the tail that normally operate in tandem to stabilize the aircraft wrench in opposite directions: the left side pulls to make the plane climb, the right one pushes to keep it in a dive. Gravity and the two powerful Pratt & Whitney engines on the Boeing 767 continue to force the plane down. A second later, a small shield is flicked up over the twin-engine control levers on the central console, and both...
After an additional 11 sec., the flight-data recorder and cockpit voice recorder stop working; the altitude-reporting transponder quits. Land radar tracks the plane as it climbs 8,000 ft. with a force of gravity 2 1/2 times normal. Then the aircraft stalls, lurches downward, breaks apart and leaves nothing on the radar screen but a cascade of neon debris falling into...
Those bare clicks, murmurs and whines recorded by the plane's two black boxes, then synchronized with ground-control radar tracks, are all the "facts" investigators have so far to construct a picture of what happened to Flight 990. But do they add up to the terrible possibility that one of the pilots deliberately sent the plane into its death dive, committing an unspeakable act of self-destruction and mass murder...
...flat wrong" speculation that "caused pain" to victims' families and had "done a disservice" to a long-standing international friendship. But despite the diplomatic delicacy, Hall, the Justice Department and FBI officials remain determined to pursue, on their own if need be, the hypothesis that someone deliberately plunged the plane into the sea. "It is not a question of whether we are in it or not in it," says the head of the FBI investigation, Lewis Schiliro...
...signaling equipment breakdown or other emergency went off before the autopilot was disconnected. The steep descent was steady and controlled. The captain would not pull his control yoke up while the co-pilot pushed down. There was no radio mayday and evidently no attempt to signal a hijacking. The plane's final climb may be explained by traditional aerodynamics or by a pilot's desperate effort to regain altitude...