Word: planes
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...rural roads the buses go through empty cow fields; one had a propeller plane in it, nothing else. Two women got on and sat behind me on the way to Baton Rogue, one with a boyfriend in jail, and asked us for money. “Got three dollars. Got a dollar? No? How ’bout a phone?” The man behind me riding through Texas, explaining the oil rigs and the horse corrals and the lines in the marshy grass that humans made for catching crawfish...
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates flies around the world to war zones and allies, to China and Russia and Suriname, on a Cold War relic called the Doomsday Plane. Forged in the 1970s by Boeing, it was designed to stay aloft even in the midst of nuclear war. It's an airborne Pentagon. The plane is so heavy that it needs refueling in midair on long flights. The Air Force crew aboard told me that on occasion, the fuel nozzle from the floating tankers has smashed through the pilots' windshield like an angry space creature...
...asked my wife one time, Why is that? And she said, 'Because you have no control.' " He paused. "Here, I have a little control," he said, tapping the plane's conference table. (See pictures of Robert Gates' career in government...
Like his fellow Cold War survivor the Doomsday Plane, Gates has come to embody power, control and an astonishing longevity. Just 5 ft. 8 in., with small hands and feet, the demure 66-year-old Kansan has outlasted seven Presidents as well as most of his fellow bureaucrats and policymakers. He's the only entry-level CIA analyst to rise to the top job, director of central intelligence. And he's the only Secretary of Defense ever to be asked to stay on in a rival party's Administration. He has thrived through a combination of endurance, pragmatism and bureaucratic...
...France lawyer Fernand Garnault told TIME last week he is convinced Continental is solely to blame for the crash. "It is clear that a piece from a Continental plane fell on the runway. It is clear that the origin of the accident was this," says Garnault, one of France's leading aviation lawyers. "This is my personal conviction and of course that of Air France...