Word: splashdowns
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...took Captain Chesley Sullenberger less than five minutes to become a hero, from the moment his Airbus A320 hit a flock of geese on Jan. 15 to its safe splashdown in the Hudson. For Captain Timothy Cheney and First Officer Richard Cole, it took an hour and a half of radio silence to become national punching bags. After their Northwest Airlines flight shot past its Minneapolis destination at 37,000 ft., air-traffic controllers feared the worst: A hijacking? A flight-deck catastrophe? After 91 minutes, the pilots resurfaced, saying they'd been absorbed in their laptops, reviewing...
...mentioned it. "He don't have to," his neighbor answers. "He's gonna do it." A coda to that idea is offered in the elegiac new documentary In the Shadow of the Moon. One of the scenes shows the men of Mission Control lighting cigars after the 1969 splashdown of Apollo 11. Behind them, on a control room viewing screen, two words are projected: TASK ACCOMPLISHED. That may be a less triumphal phrasing than "mission," but whatever you call it, Americans knew enough not to boast about a thing until we had done...
...traveling at a searing 24,700 m.p.h. Even after it unfurls its parachute-like parafoil and begins coasting toward the Utah desert, it will be heading for a thudding 22m.p.h. touchdown, enough to damage the collector plates, particularly if the ship has already been dinged by micrometeorites. An ocean splashdown would cause only a marginally smaller bump and would present a further risk of water contamination...