Word: runway
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...carried out by Palestinian guerrillas? Not quite. A few minutes after that scene occurred over Czechoslovakia last week, the Prague-bound BAC One-Eleven jetliner flown by Rumania's TAROM airlines landed at Munich international airport. As the hijackers stepped onto West German soil, they knelt on the runway to say a prayer of thanksgiving. While the airliner was refueling to resume its interrupted flight, another of the passengers, a 31-year-old East Berlin engineer who had had nothing to do with the hijacking, decided on the spur of the moment to capitalize on his good fortune...
...forced his way into the cockpit and held a revolver on Priddy. The hijackers then ordered him to fly to Beirut, where airport officials sent radio warnings to the plane that it would be dangerous for the giant aircraft to attempt a landing on a runway that had not been reinforced to bear the 500,000 lbs. of the immense 747. "My brother, this plane is not like a 707 ?it requires better facilities to land," pleaded one Beirut air controller. The hijackers remained adamant, and Priddy put the plane down without incident...
...frees itself from the station, drops back toward earth and re-enters the atmosphere at a sharp nose-up angle that quickly slows it down. Like the mother ship, it then fires up the fan jets hidden in its tail and flies to a landing on an ordinary airport runway...
...jacket, Barkley replied, "Sure, might as well go down in comfort." Still aching for his $100 million, however, he gave ground authorities one more chance to raise the cash, which was to be in 100 sacks full of bills of not less than $100 denominations placed along the runway at Dulles. Then he ordered the airplane to return to Dulles...
Swigert is no stranger to in-flight emergencies. Once, while flying with the Air Force in Korea, he landed his plane in a driving squall, crashed into a road grader someone had left on the runway and walked away unscratched from the blaze that demolished his aircraft. Another time, as he was landing at Buckley Air Field near Denver, his brakes failed and his plane slammed into the base's arresting cables, but he escaped unhurt. Although he was a last-minute replacement on Apollo 13's star-crossed trip, Swigert showed great skill in improvising new emergency...