Word: runway
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...weather was humid but not unusual as Flight 123 lifted off runway C-15-L at Haneda and climbed through a light cloud cover. At the controls was Captain Masami Takahama, 49, who had flown for JAL since 1966 and was so highly regarded that he had been transferred from international to domestic routes four years ago so that he could help train new pilots. The rest of the crew included a co-pilot, a flight engineer and twelve cabin attendants. There were 509 passengers aboard the 747SR, a short-range version of the jumbo. JAL and All Nippon Airways...
...farther than Malta. At first the tower at Malta's Luqa International Airport refused to let the Egyptian airliner land, but authorities relented after Captain Galal told them that he was in imminent danger of crashing into the sea because he was nearly out of fuel. Even so, the runway lights were still off and Galal, with a gun barrel at his head, had to rely on his plane's landing lights to pierce the darkness as he touched down. The tower ordered him to taxi to a remote parking area; four police buses then blocked both ends...
...less fortunate. She stayed in her seat when the hijackers began searching for her, but they managed to identify her from her passport photo. With her hands tied, she was dragged to the open doorway, where she too was shot in the head and thrown onto the runway. Beneath the plane, the wounded Artzi crawled toward her friend's body, but one of the hijackers saw her and shot her in the hip. "They shot us as a sport," she said later, "as though they were shooting dogs." Mendelson never regained consciousness, and three days later was pronounced clinically dead...
...Baker, 28, of White Salmon, Wash. Baker remarked later that one hijacker, upon first seeing the young American's passport, had smiled and said in English, "Welcome." To himself Baker thought, "Welcome to my nightmare." Like the Israeli women, Baker was shot in the head and dumped onto the runway. But like Artzi, he received only a superficial wound. He pretended to be dead, waited for the hijackers to go back inside, and then escaped. The next victims were Rogenkamp, a civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force in Greece, who was shot and killed, and another American woman, Jackie...
...every two weeks. But in internal NASA memos that have leaked out, Chief Astronaut John Young charges that safety was sacrificed to "launch-schedule pressure." Young, 55, a highly respected veteran of shuttle or bits and Apollo moon flights, warned of an "awesome" list of safety problems, including a runway at Florida's Kennedy Space Center that is too short, too rough and subject to erratic weather. While gliding the 100-ton shuttle into Kennedy rather than onto the dry lake beds at Ed wards Air Force Base in the California desert "may be a wonderful political policy," Young wrote...