Word: taile
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Late in the war, two B-17 bombers collided over Belgium at 13,500 ft., and one of them was sheared in two. From the main section, one crewman succeeded in bailing out, but the rest crashed to their deaths. In the tail, Joe Frank Jones Jr., a 19-year-old gunner, tried to get out the escape hatch, found it jammed. He tried the window, but it was too small. He was trapped inside the plunging fragment. When Belgian peasants found him lying in a field, still alive, they took him to a hospital. There he lay unconscious...
...clues were thought to be contained in two small bright orange metal boxes, commonly called "black boxes." One records the voices of the plane's crew; the other collects data about flight conditions. Both boxes are located behind a ceiling panel just forward of the Boeing 747's tail. Although the boxes are designed to survive fires, crashes and immersion in salt water, the problem facing searchers was immense: Flight 182's recorders were in the plane's wreckage more than a mile below the ocean surface, deeper than any human diver...
...models raised questions for the project's paleontological team, headed by University of Texas at Austin Professor Wann Langston. MacCready's engineers wanted to know how the animal moved and how far forward it could swing its wings. Did it have webbed feet? (Answer: no.) Did it have a tail? (No.) Could its head have been shaped differently from what was previously thought? (Unresolved: only a few fragments of the skull have been recovered.) Each question sent the paleontologists back to examine the fossilized remnants of the giant pterosaur, which were discovered in 1971 scattered over a half-acre...
Safety, however, will be paramount in the minds of the crew. Collins will be commanding the shuttle's first ever nose-over-tail spin, so the tiled underbelly can be photographed by the International Space Station and checked for problems. After docking with the station, her team will conduct experimental repairs on tile samples during space walks, using a caulk gun to fill gouges with high-tech goo and sponge brushes to add heat-resistant coating. Collins sees the mission as an important step in getting the U.S. space program back on track--and headed toward manned trips...
...bird of the title is missing for most of the movie. But images that allude to it flutter through the film, in the splaying tail feathers of a dying duck, the folds of an accordion and the breathtaking flight of a parachute harnessed to the back of a bicycle. When a real peacock appears in the movie's quiet coda, it declines to spread its plumage on demand and the onlookers move on, disappointed. Its splendor, like the Gao children's dreams, remains unfledged and all-too-rarely glimpsed. Fortunately, this is not the case with Gu's talents...