Word: swoopings
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...relatively slow A-10 Thunderbolt is a "close-support" aircraft, intended to swoop in low over a battlefield and savage the enemy's infantry and armor. When the prototype jets started flying in 1975, some Air Force brass were worried that its GAU8 antitank cannon was not up to snuff. The nose-mounted, 30-mm weapon was like a Gatling gun, with seven rotating barrels. And like a Gatling gun, it seemed a little oldfashioned, unworthy of a state-of-the-art Air Force. Colonel Bob Dilger was ordered to Dayton to take over the GAU8 program...
...first Shakespearean role after 46 years of acting, Anne Baxter, 59 (The Razor's Edge, All About Eve), managed in one falling swoop to live up to two of the stage's hoariest bywords: "Break a leg" and "The show must go on." At the opening of Stratford, Conn.'s American Shakespeare Theater production of Hamlet, Baxter, playing Queen Gertrude to Christopher Walken's Hamlet, was maneuvering herself and her 20-lb. dress down a darkened backstage staircase when she tumbled, breaking her foot and spraining her ankle. Baxter then made it through the second half...
...months or even years, and to perform a greater variety of functions. The U.S. currently has at least two photographic systems orbiting over the South Atlantic, the twelve-ton Big Bird and the newer KH-11. The systems are more sophisticated than the Soviet satellites. Big Bird can swoop from as high as 170 miles (for wide-angle views) to as low as 100 miles (for close-up shots). The KH-11 records images in digital form, rather than on film, and can beam pictures to ground stations around the globe for instant...
...shelling: dead black mesquite trees, torn out of the ground, lie in a vast twisted litter. Vultures like to sit in sinister profile upon the dead trees; they give the scene an eerie stylized hellishness. This particular mesquite has been the victim of chaining and spraying: crop-dusting planes swoop in low over the range and spray a chemical called TORDON 225E onto the mesquite. A year or more later, a pair of bulldozers about a hundred yards apart make their way across the same area dragging an enormous ship's anchor chain between them...
...routine thus intersecting another and disrupting both. Then, too, there was the location of the event. Washington, the city of form and regulations, turned chaotic, deregulated, by a blast of real winter and a single slap of metal on metal. The jets from Washington National Airport that normally swoop around the presidential monuments like famished gulls are, for the moment, emblemized by the one that fell; so there is that detail. And there was the aesthetic clash as well-blue-and-green Air Florida, the name a flying garden, sunk down among gray chunks in a black river. All that...