Word: radar
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...dramatize their overwork and the limitations of radar tracking equipment no longer able to cope with the crowded sky, the newly unionized controllers began to play the game according to the book. They invoked long-avoided regulations requiring at least a three-mile separation between planes for safety (in recent months, aircraft had been allowed as close as two miles). One proposal to ease the jam included a temporary shutdown of 335 FAA-manned flight service stations and transfer of their 900 controllers to busier towers...
...daily food imports of at least 200 tons, a target that a fly-by-night air lift of chartered old Constellations has not been able to meet. A bare trickle of supplies has been flown in, some by the Vatican. The flight into Biafra is a dangerous trip through radar-guided Nigerian antiaircraft fire to a secret, kerosene-lit airstrip that one pilot describes as "little wider than a bicycle path." A medicine-laden aircraft crashed last month, killing its American pilot and two other Americans...
...highlight a shortage of controller manpower. Because of this dearth, controllers often have had to work ten-hour shifts and sixday weeks, which can be pretty grueling when one is juggling 20 planes per minute. Typical salaries start at $6,321 and stop at $15,828. Jets on radar screens show up so indistinctly that one controller literally died of fright. Says Michael Rock, chairman of PATCO: "It seems ridiculous that NASA can track a needle and we can't even make out two giant jets if they are closer than a mile and a half...
...during a five-year stint as a radar instructor in the R.A.F., Clarke wrote an article called "Extraterrestrial Relays" for the magazine Wireless World. Heart of the piece was a detailed proposal for a synchronous communications satellite. Almost 20 years later, the device became a reality as Syncom 2. After the war, Clarke went to Kinks College in London, graduated with honors in physics and math, soon turned to writing full time...
...huge Graydon Smith "coffee grinders" that are improved versions of those used on last year's America's Cup winner, Intrepid, and cost $20,000 apiece. Ondine has two cockpits (to keep other crewmen from interfering with the helmsman), and just about every navigational device short of radar: VOR, Loran, ADF, four wind indicators. Sailing Ondine takes a total crew of 20, including a professional captain, a ship's doctor (who doubles as cook), an engineer, a navigator-Long himself- and 16 deck hands who work in shifts or watches of eight at a time. "Logistics...