Word: 5a
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...against distance. It is proving to be a tough one. Despite the $2.5 trillion spent on defense over the past decade, the U.S. lacks enough cargo planes and ships to deliver its armed forces to trouble spots around the globe. Transport planes like the C- 141 Starlifter and C-5A Galaxy are still the workhorses of the Air Force, but they are aging, and their production lines have long been closed. The next-generation airlifter, the C-17, has encountered repeated delays in nine years of development and is not yet in service. In the meantime, most of the troops...
Basically, what GE did was to painstakingly refine its military designs into a line of passenger-jet engines. Its CF6, currently a popular engine for jumbo jets, was derived from a design initially developed in the late 1960s for the Air Force's giant C-5A cargo plane. The engine was the first to use a high- bypass technique in which a fan, working like a turbocharger in an automobile, pushes large quantities of air past the combustion core to produce much greater thrust. The CF6 turbofan (current cost: $6 million each) has broken the hold Pratt & Whitney had with...
When a U.S. Air Force C-5A transport plane landed in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz to launch the latest battle in America's war on drugs, the far-off town of Trinidad, 250 miles to the northwest, paid little heed. But the next day Trinidad Mayor Pedro Alvarez was summoned to the local Bolivian air force base for some unsettling news. The gringos are coming, he was informed; the base would need another well. Since that day, the tranquil cattle-farming community of Trinidad (pop. 40,000), capital of Bolivia's northeastern Beni region, has not been...
Word leaked out almost as soon as the giant U.S. Air Force C-5A transport plane touched down in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. As U.S. embassy spokesmen in the capital city of La Paz and Defense Department officials in Washington tried to downplay the matter, headlines in Bolivia and the U.S. were blaring the news: in the first use of a U.S. military operation on foreign soil to fight drugs, Army Black Hawk helicopters, armed with .30-cal. machine guns and escorted by about 160 U.S. soldiers, had been flown into the South American jungle to assist Bolivian...
...country before the forces arrived. Said Bolivian Ambassador to the U.S. Fernando Illanes: "With all the advance advice, I think everybody is scampering." At the outset, the mission had a comicopera quality to it. The planned arrival from the U.S. Southern Command in Panama of the C-5A transport ferrying the helicopters, to be followed by C-130 troop planes, had to be delayed three days because a wildcat gasoline strike prevented refueling at Santa Cruz airport. While the huge C-5A sat at the airport in full view of TV cameras, reporters and, presumably, drug merchants, U.S. troops needed...