Word: takeoffs
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Bizarre might be the word to describe the success of Dorf on Golf, which, with sales of more than 150,000, is one of the surprise hits of the home-video field. A takeoff on the multitude of golf instructional tapes, it features Conway standing on his knees to appear like a midget and doing a slow burn through a feeble series of slapstick gags. A newly released sequel, Dorf and the First Games of Mt. Olympus, has even less point or wit, as the character participates in the hurdles, pole vault and other Olympic events with the help...
...Soviets have conducted a successful test flight of a Tupolev Tu-154 passenger jet modified to burn a mixture of liquid hydrogen and natural gas. The three- engine jet, which lifted off near Moscow and flew for 21 minutes, was the first aircraft to use the fuel in takeoff. Says Senator Spark Matsunaga, a Hawaii Democrat and a leading advocate of a U.S. hydrogen-fuel research program: "It appears that the Soviets have stolen a technological march...
...week the National Transportation Safety Board said "overwhelming evidence" points to pilot error as the cause of the accident. The agency said Captain John Maus and First Officer David Dodds skipped critical parts of their preflight routine and neglected to set the wing flaps to provide enough lift for takeoff. But the Air Line Pilots Association argued that the board gave insufficient weight to the fact that the alarm system on the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 failed to warn the crew that the flaps were not in position. Said Allison Maus, the captain's widow: "It's easy to blame...
...hazards of faulty maintenance have been amply demonstrated in several catastrophic crashes. The worst U.S. case was in 1979, when a replacement engine that had been improperly mounted on the wing of an American Airlines DC-10 broke free on takeoff from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, causing a crash that killed 275. Only three years ago, the worst single-plane accident in history occurred when a bulkhead ruptured on a Japan Air Lines 747, destroying the tail assembly and sending the jumbo jet crashing into a mountain near Tokyo, killing 520. Boeing later admitted that its technicians...
...skin. When the cracks ruptured, the air rushing by began to peel back the roof through the so-called rip stops, the rigid upright supports in the body shell. Investigators surmise that the metal fatigue was hastened by exposure to corrosive salt air and the exceptionally high number of takeoff-and-landing cycles, nearly 90,000, that the 19-year-old island-hopping plane had completed. The number of cycles is significant because each time a plane is pressurized, its metal skin expands slightly, which after a great number of repetitions can cause fatigue...