Word: tarmac
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...stepped off the Aeroflot jetliner onto the tarmac of Moscow's Vnukovo Airport, Afghanistan's President Babrak Karmal was given effusive greetings by a phalanx of Soviet officials led by Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev. The Afghan leader was on his first venture outside the Soviet-occupied country since he was installed as Moscow's puppet last December. The sheer number of senior Soviet Politburo members participating in the Moscow welcome demonstrated the Kremlin's obvious desire to shore up Karmal's legitimacy and make a show of his supposed influence with the Kremlin. Mused...
...indication that any one of them has the desire or feels the need to do so. Compared with the convulsions plaguing Iran, the atmosphere on the Arab side of the gulf is relatively calm. Business is good. Oil money has brought riches beyond imagination. Black ribbons of tarmac connect capitals of concrete and glass that have mushroomed where small fishing and pearling villages stood little more than a decade...
...Schmidt stepped down from his white and blue Luftwaffe jet at Moscow's Vnukovo II Airport, President Leonid Brezhnev, Premier Alexei Kosygin and Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko were on hand, along with a goose-stepping honor guard. Belying rumors about his ill health, Brezhnev strolled briskly across the Tarmac to greet Schmidt. The ceremony was clearly intended to convey the Kremlin's satisfaction that the Soviets were no longer considered in moral quarantine by the West...
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...