Word: takeoff
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...long Boeing 747 jumbo jets, each weighing some 700,000 Ibs., had collided?incredibly?on the ground. Taking off down a runway visible for less than a sixth of its length, KLM 4805 (the Rhine River) smashed into Pan American 1736 (the Clipper Victor), taxiing toward the same takeoff point. Roaring at full power, the KLM's hot engines (2000° F.) and massive landing gear crunched through the Pan Am's fuselage with such impact and explosive fire that aluminum and steel parts of both planes were vaporized. The KLM's giant engine airlets sucked fragments...
...that could have prevented the KLM pilot from hearing the last vital communications from the airport tower or from the Pan Am cockpit. If both pilots and the tower controllers had fully heard ?and understood?one another, the KLM pilot would never have sent his craft hurtling toward takeoff before the Pan Am plane was off the runway...
...Pilot Jacob Veldhuizen Van Zanten, 51, a 25-year career flyer so experienced that he spent half his time training other KLM pilots (when a KLM official first heard of the crash he wanted to send a pilot to the investigation: Veldhuizen), rolled toward takeoff without getting tower clearance to do so? Even defensive Dutch authorities agreed that "no takeoff clearance had been given...
...ward off their nervousness about the whole affair. ("You know," Nichols says, "In the last two hours I can't tell you how my anxieties have been allayed.") Perhaps the comparative brilliance of "Bach to Bach" says something significant--that the less visually explicit the sexuality of a takeoff is, the more room is left for imaginative satire...
Deregulation Myth. Soon the SST will again be roaring around Adams: outgoing Secretary William T. Coleman Jr.'s 16-month test of the Concorde's landing and takeoff sound levels and other environmental effects at Dulles Airport near Washington, D.C., expires next summer. It will be up to Adams to decide if the flights are to continue...