Word: tarmac
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Just getting aloft presents its challenges. Planes regularly land and take off not just hours but even days late. One foreign traveler waited in a Moscow airport for 17 hours before his flight to Tbilisi was announced. His airport bus proceeded to roll along the tarmac and stop at three different planes; at each one the ground hostess would yell out: "Is this the plane to Tbilisi?" The bus finally came to the fourth-and right-plane. There was only one problem: no pilot. The traveler finally abandoned the effort at 3 a.m., luggage unclaimed and Tbilisi unvisited...
...traumatic as the upset was for Boeing, however, it was equally painful for the city of Seattle. With the Puget Sound's largest single employer facing ruin and the tarmac at Boeing's Everett assembly plant, the biggest such plane factory in the world, choked with unsold jumbo jets, Seattle's entire economy went into a slump. A grimly cynical highway billboard on a road heading out of town summed up the prevailing gloom: "Will the last person leaving Seattle please turn out the lights...
...having fought, let us now say: 'It is all over.' " Those conciliatory words were spoken by Joshua Nkomo after he emerged from a green and white Zambia Airways jet onto the tarmac of Salisbury airport. The bulky, silver-haired black nationalist leader had returned to Rhodesia, after more than three years of exile, to begin campaigning for next month's independence elections. Because of a flurry of death threats, security at the airport was extremely heavy: grim reminders of lingering white bitterness over Nkomo's role in Rhodesia's bloody seven-year guerrilla...