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Just before midnight on April 12, 1977, Delta Air Lines Flight 1080 lifted off from San Diego in the dark and immediately pitched its nose skyward toward a fatal aerodynamic stall. Earlier that day, water from aroutine wash had seeped into a left rear stabilizer bearing on the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar and frozen solid during a previous high-altitude flight. Nobody on the ground knew that the elevator control surface on the tail was jammed at a violent nineteen-degree nose-up angle. The moment the wheels left the runway, the two-hundred-ton wide-body jetliner began climbing steeper and steeper into a thick layer of night clouds at four hundred feet. Fifty-three-year-old Captain Jack McMahan, a former United States Marine Corps fighter pilot with fifteen thousand hours in the air, pushed his control column all the way forward against the instrument panel. Nothing happened. His first officer and flight engineer pushed their controls forward too, and the nose kept rising as the airspeed bled away toward the stall warning speed of one hundred and twenty-eight knots. If a two-hundred-ton airliner stalls inside low clouds at night just above the rooftops of San Diego, nobody survives. How did Captain McMahan force the nose of a jammed jetliner down when the elevator controls were completely dead? In less than ten seconds inside the pitch-black cloud bank, McMahan pictured the exact geometry of the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar in his mind. The L-1011 had three Rolls-Royce turbofan engines: Engines One and Three hung low beneath the left and right wings, below the airplane's center of gravity, while Engine Number Two was mounted high inside the base of the tail fin, above the center of gravity. Because the low wing engines sat underneath the balance point, their forward thrust was pushing the nose upward like a lever. Without hesitation, McMahan pulled back the throttles on the two wing engines while leaving the high tail engine roaring at full power. Pushing from high above the fuselage, the center tail engine levered the nose down through the clouds just as the airspeed dropped to one hundred and thirty knots, two knots shy of a fatal stall. Instead of ditching in the dark ocean off San Diego, McMahan flew the crippled giant ninety miles north to Los Angeles International Airport, where the weather was clear and the runways were long. Using only his three throttle levers to climb, descend, and bank through the night sky, the former Marine landed Flight 1080 smoothly on Runway 06R in the rain and saved all fifty-two souls on board. (For transparency: all images in my posts are produced using AI.)

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Destiny lays out all his claims after Hasan threatened to sue him "See you in court!"

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The City of Austin is paying a "women of color-led" Seattle consultant $288,961 to interview 113 people with HIV. That's $2,557 per interview. The consultant, Cardea, says its work is about fighting "systemic, structural, and institutional racism and oppression." - $74,961 for eight months of planning with no real interviews, only practice ones "in a simulated interview space" - $74,000 to schedule the interviews - $36,800 for committee meetings, including $800 for flip charts and markers - $17,500 for marketing One published finding: "Stigma creates barriers to care and treatment." Each person interviewed got a $100 gift card.