Word: seat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
While passengers studied emergency landing cards, flight attendants demonstrated the emergency "brace" position: heads down, hands grasping ankles. Some passengers sought diversion from the gathering tension. Steve Willuweit, 46, seated in Row 16, went back to reading an Arthur C. Clarke science-fiction novel: "I didn't want to think about anything except getting up and walking off the plane." Lori Michaelson was instructed to place her year-old baby Sabrina on the floor near her seat...
...smoke and fire were heavy at one end of this upside-down cabin section, but the breakup opened a wide escape avenue at the other end. "I looked for where the emergency exit used to be," said David Landsberger, a New Jersey businessman who had been in Seat 13B. "But it wasn't there. Then I looked toward the front of the plane, and I saw daylight. Then I saw green stuff beyond the mud, and when I got out I found myself in a cornfield...
...rows ahead of Landsberger, Mark Michaelson and his wife Lori unbuckled their seat belts and dropped to what is normally the ceiling of the DC-10. Separately, they hustled two of their three children out of the wreckage. But each thought the other had baby Sabrina. The father ran back to the fuselage. "I could hear her crying, but I couldn't see her." There was too much smoke, then flames. But passenger Jerry Schemmel had heard the cries first. He plunged into the fiery fuselage, found the baby in an upside-down overhead bin, ran into the cornfield...
...until the final seconds. "He belongs in the pilots' hall of fame," declared Joe Sullivan, a retired flight engineer for American Airlines. The landing gear, dropped by gravity because of the hydraulics failure, helped support the part of the cabin where most survivors had been seated. The dampness of the cornfield from recent rains cushioned the crash impact. Fire-resistant seat upholstery installed at the insistence of the National Transportation Safety Board was also credited. So too were the rescue and medical efforts of the Sioux City area. So many doctors responded that there were two on hand for each...
...includes being the visible front man. Sitting through nine sweaty innings is part of his strategy to improve the image of a club whose fortunes had been waning. No air-conditioned sky box for this owner. "I want the folks to see me sitting in the same kind of seat they sit in," he says, "eating the same popcorn, peeing in the same urinal." So he is quite happy when fans chirp to him about the team's improved won-lost record. He saves his broadest, Hollywood-handsome grin for the occasional urging that he run for Governor...