Word: planes
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...million in 1988 for the 2,800-acre (roughly 1,000 hectares) ranch in California that would become Neverland. Maintaining the theme park - complete with zoo, movie theater and fairground - swallowed up about $5 million annually. As Jackson gradually retreated from work, the additional millions eaten up by plane charters, antiques, lavish gifts and legal disputes - a child-molestation case in the early 1990s cost Jackson around $20 million to settle - left a hole in his fortune. To help plug it, in 1995 the singer signed over to Sony a 50% stake in the rights to the Beatles' catalog...
Your chances of being involved in a plane crash are pretty slim. By some estimates, they're as low as 1 in 11 million. But should you live through one - possibly as a gesture toward cosmic compensation - your shot at a book deal goes way up. There are two new memoirs out by survivors of plane crashes: Ollestad's Crazy for the Storm (Ecco; 272 pages) and Robert Sabbag's Down Around Midnight (Viking; 214 pages). Starbucks has picked Ollestad's memoir for its book program, and you can see why: plane crashes are usually unknowable, secret events...
...missing aircraft began to surface on June 6, Air France Flight 447 and its 228 passengers and crew seemed to have vanished into thin air. There were no last-minute distress calls from the cockpit; just 24 automatic satellite messages--some indicating major system failures - relayed from the stricken plane to Air France maintenance headquarters. Even now, as recovery teams retrieve flotsam and victims' bodies, the black boxes that recorded the flight's final moments remain as much as 2 miles (3.2 km) deep. (See pictures of the search for Flight...
...grab bag of speculation about what doomed the four-year-old Airbus A330. Bloggers and aviation experts flit from theory to theory. A terrorist attack? A lightning strike? Some catastrophic technical failure? The first two explanations have largely been discounted (no terrorist group has claimed responsibility, and planes are built to shrug off lightning strikes). Most aircraft accidents stem from an unfortunate cascade of events rather than from any single system malfunction. It's becoming clearer that some combination of weather, an unknown flight-control failure and perhaps the crew's inability to respond is probably to blame. The pilots...
...morning of Feb. 19, 1979, a Cessna 172 took off from Santa Monica, Calif., bound for the ski resort Big Bear. On board were Norman Ollestad, his father, his father's girlfriend Sandra and the pilot. Crossing the San Gabriel Mountains in heavy gray snow clouds, the plane failed to clear Ontario Peak. It crashed into the mountain at 8,200 ft. (2,500 m), just short of the summit, in the middle of a blizzard. Norman and Sandra survived the initial impact, but only Norman made it down off the mountain...