Word: planes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...because Jordan appears at Clinton's side at the direst of times. He was with Governor Clinton in 1980 after the young pol's bitter electoral defeat. He was with President Clinton on the night of Vincent Foster's suicide, the day of Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's fatal plane crash, and the night consultant Dick Morris was thrown overboard at the 1996 Democratic National Convention because of a sex scandal. He knows how to clean up a mess. "The last thing he'd ever do is betray a friendship," Clinton once told the New York Times. "It's good...
...pilot, I was disappointed in your report on the T-3, the propeller-driven trainer flown by cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy that has killed six people in three crashes [NATION, Jan. 12]. By suggesting that the failure of the plane's single engine has caused the aircraft to fall and corkscrew into the ground, you perpetuate the misunderstanding that flying and airplanes are inherently dangerous. The truth is that a good pilot will almost always walk away uninjured from an engine failure by finding an open space on the ground and gliding the plane to a forced...
Thanks to Mark Thompson for turning the spotlight on the safety problems with the T-3. Our son, Captain Dan Fischer, mentioned in the report, was the first instructor to die in a T-3 crash. It is clear to us that the T-3 is a flawed "dream" plane, promoted by an arrogant Air Force general, Merrill McPeak. He expected inexperienced students to be able to do spins and rolls without parachutes. These young people were the victims of a program hurriedly begun before the T-3 was adequately adapted for the thin Colorado air, before instructors were sufficiently...
What kind of military stupidity allows the top brass to decide the merits of training techniques in a proven inferior aircraft? A plane with 66 engine failures and 119 recommended "fixes" by its English manufacturer is a certain invitation to disaster. Even more asinine is the fact that the people in charge ignored the flight instructors' declarations of danger. Maybe the top brass should have been forced to fly in the questionable T-3. That would have educated or eliminated our faulty decision makers. DANA VICKERY Gardner, Mass...
...flying makes you queasy, you'll be relieved to know that Pathfinder--NASA's ultralight, solar-powered aircraft, that is, not the Mars lander of the same name--isn't taking passengers just yet. But according to a NASA briefing last week, the remote-controlled plane's high-altitude (71,500 ft.), low-speed (15 m.p.h.) flights are perfect for the kind of environmental research now being done by orbiting satellites. Pathfinder's flexible 99-ft. wings, glistening with $1 million worth of solar panels, have been tested only in sunny Hawaii. So the plane carries a backup battery system...