Word: runway
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...save time in covering the vast distances, Shaw and Sochurek did most of their traveling by air, including one memorable morning when they waited 20 minutes in -25° weather before the Aeroflot crew arrived and unlocked the plane. "It had been sitting on the freezing runway all night," Shaw recalls. "The temperature inside was about 20 below, and there were thick icicles inside the door. Finally a crewman hauled aboard a hose from the engine-warmup truck and began blasting hot air straight into the cabin. It was rough, but it worked-a bit like Siberia itself." Our story...
Stares. The need for reconstruction was obvious from the moment Kissinger arrived in the city that the U.S. had so recently bombed. His blue and white presidential 707 was forced to land at a military airbase well outside the city because the runway at Hanoi's Gia Lam airport is too short. The area surrounding Hanoi's airfield is leveled, and many bridges are still out. The 30-minute motorcade of curtained black Russian sedans had to cross a plank-covered steel pontoon bridge over the Red River to enter Hanoi...
...Jordanian jet was under charter to Nigeria Airways, which each year runs a special shuttle to ferry Nigerian Moslems making their pilgrimages to Mecca. Jordanian and Nigerian authorities differed on the cause of the crash. The Jordanians maintained that the runway had collapsed and that Pilot John Waterman, 53, an American with 22,000 jet hours, lost control because of the depression in the strip, which snapped the plane's rugged landing gear. The plane then slued off the runway and burst into flames when fuel lines were punctured...
...Nigerians denied that the runway was responsible for the crash and claimed that the pilot had ignored control-tower orders not to land because of weather conditions. Actually, the cause of the crash might have been a combination of factors. Aircraft experts pointed out that jet fuel in Nigeria is so expensive that the 707 might have been carrying an extra supply. Even though it was an estimated 10,000 Ibs. below its permissible landing weight of 247,000 Ibs., the heavy plane might have crumpled the runway. The resulting hole could have caused the landing gear to collapse...
...three full hours a seemingly endless stream of the huge war machines thundered past Charlie Tower, at the end of Andersen's 12,000-ft. runway, to get final takeoff clearance. Then they roared mightily down the gentle decline of the salad-bowl-shaped runway, howled back up the last stretch before finally lifting their 490,000 lbs. off the ground, jet exhausts trailing thick clouds of black smoke...