Word: runway
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...women) who are polished professionals. Day after day, unheard by the passengers riding in the sky, controllers spot pilots who have strayed into trouble and direct them to safety. A disaster could occur during even the most mundane procedure?beginning with taxiing out to the end of the runway, as Tenerife grimly demonstrated...
...help the pilot get the plane to the end of the runway, controllers at ten major airports around the country are equipped with special ground-sweeping radar designed to penetrate the kind of haze that obscured the vision of the KLM and Pan Am pilots last week. During the next five years, 30 more American airports are due to receive the new radar, which still needs to be made more reliable...
When the controller in the tower is sure that the runway is safe, he gives the command to go: "Eastern 158, cleared for takeoff." Soon after the jet leaves the ground, another technician in the station, known as departure control, picks up the jet on radar and guides it out of the general area of the airport. Next, a controller in one of the 20 air-route traffic control centers that blanket the country takes over responsibility, monitors the jet through his section of the sky, and then hands it on to the adjoining control center...
...procedures, which require planes to land and take off over the ocean, where visibility is often obscured by fog banks. Observes one veteran pilot: "L.A. Airport is a disaster waiting to happen." Though the airport has cut back on over-ocean landings and installed new instrument-landing systems for runway approaches, some pilots still fear that they may set down in the water...
...THOMAS, VIRGIN ISLANDS: The short runway at the Harry Truman Airport gives jet pilots too little margin for error, and was blamed for the crash of an American Airlines jet last year. Construction of a runway extension has not yet begun, though federal funds have been made available...