Word: aircrafting
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Unusual indeed. Rust's feat was one of the oddest milestones in the history of aviation. Aircraft are rarely allowed to overfly -- much less touch down in -- the tightly guarded center of Moscow, which is ringed by an antiballistic missile system that is usually described as formidable. Moreover, Rust had managed to fly unmolested from Helsinki across more than 400 miles of the most heavily guarded airspace in the world. Said a Western diplomat in Moscow: "This puts a hole right through one of the great myths of this place, the myth of invincibility and impenetrability." A Soviet official...
...chain reaction. The Wrights were also practical tradesmen who could finance their flying experiments through the cycle company. The cost of building and launching the 1903 Flyer was, according to Orville, less than $1,000, while the U.S. Government spent $50,000 to have Samuel Langley construct a similar aircraft that fell into the Potomac River seconds after takeoff...
...began tapping at his keyboard. With one stroke he zoomed in to an aerial view of the New York metropolitan area, divided not along town or county lines but along sectors of airspace. With another keystroke he eliminated hundreds of tiny black dots showing the location of low-flying aircraft and private jets. What remained on the screen were larger, winged symbols representing commercial airliners. With a few more key taps he color-coded the jetliners according to their airport destination: red for La Guardia, green for Newark, brown for John F. Kennedy...
Well, at least impressively intricate. Last week's display -- more evolutionary than revolutionary -- involved the funneling of data on aircraft position, altitude, speed and identification from each of the regional air- traffic control centers to the FAA's Washington headquarters. There the information is merged into a manageable whole by an assembly of Apollo workstations and displayed via custom-designed software on as many as three dozen screens. The objective of the system is to provide centralized management of traffic problems as they may build up at any of the country's 12,500 airports. Cost of the new computer...
...glowing new capability is attracting curiosity from other federal agencies. The Defense Department, which must monitor the flow of aircraft into the U.S.'s air defense identification zone, is said to be fascinated by the new system. So is the Drug Enforcement Administration, which desperately seeks to know the identity of every aircraft entering U.S. airspace, especially those from the south. They are particularly impressed with an FAA feature that allows controllers to place an electronic cursor over an individual blip, press a key and see all the available aircraft data displayed on the screen. Any blip that fails...