Word: aircrafting
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...McNally's latest book, Until Your Heart Stops, is his first full length novel. But it won't be his first success: in 1990, McNally won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction for his collection of short stories, Low Flying Aircraft. Critics greeted his short stories with open arms. They all loved his "voice." A reviewer for San Francisco Chronicle described his "original language;" in The New York Times a critic gushed about his "stark, imaginistic prose...
...chimera. That was the first painful lesson of the U.S. airdrop of food and medical supplies over Bosnia, an effort widely touted as nonmilitary in intent and, by offering help to all, evenhanded in scope. In night after night of high-altitude cargo clearing missions, U.S. C-130 aircraft parachuted tons of goods to the republic's warring multiethnic residents. But the rain of relief had unpleasant consequences. Not only did it make sniper targets out of many who ventured out to retrieve it, but it may also have helped provide cover for a massive new Serbian offensive against Bosnia...
...cobweb glistening with dew seems as fragile as it is lovely. But one day soon, predicts University of Wyoming biologist Randy Lewis, man-made analogues of spider silk will be put to an astonishing variety of heavy-duty uses, from reinforcing fibers in aircraft doors to body-hugging suits for downhill skiers. Over the past four years, Lewis has played the attentive host to dozens of fist-size spiders called golden orb weavers, housing them in Plexiglas condominiums, feeding them a daily diet of flies and, every now and then, flipping them on their backs to unravel yards of gossamer...
Metallurgist Ann Van Orden, for her part, is fascinated by the fibrous structure of rhinoceros horn. "What strikes me about rhino horn," says Van Orden, "is that it is a natural composite. Really, it looks just like the material used to make the wings of a Stealth aircraft!" The benefits that might flow from such an insight can only be guessed at. Perhaps most intriguing is the fact that rhino horn is self-healing: capable of repairing the tiny cracks that come from jousting matches with other rhinos. "Now imagine a car that could self-heal after a fender bender...
...argued against the goal of feeding starving people, but the airdrops raise tricky problems. The quantity of supplies carried by the aircraft is limited; they will supplement, not replace, the aid brought in by truck. The deliveries are to be made by a fleet of 18 C-130 Hercules cargo planes based at the Rhein-Main air base outside Frankfurt, each capable of hauling 12 tons of supplies at a time; the land convoys usually carry from 60 to 100 tons. Dropped from altitudes of 10,000 ft., to stay above the range of antiaircraft fire, the parachuted supplies, says...