Hard Landing

An Alitalia flight from Rome made a "hard landing" Friday at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, blowing out its two front tires. No one was injured in the landing, officials said.

NEW YORK -- A commuter ferry hit a dock while arriving in lower Manhattan on Wednesday, and several people were injured and carried away on stretchers. The extent of the injuries was not immediately clear, but the ferry, the Seastreak Wall Street, had a large gash on its front right side, close to where passengers would have gathered to disembark. Some of the passengers were sitting upright on the dock where emergency workers had gathered, with bandages on their heads. Other passengers were strapped to stretchers and taken off the dock.

Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people aboard, probably made a hard belly landing and broke up on impact, French investigators said Thursday, citing preliminary evidence. None of the life jackets found by salvage teams were inflated, meaning passengers were not able to prepare for a water landing, said lead investigator Alain Bouillard. He said investigators could not determine whether the passengers were conscious at the time of the crash.

A Gulfstream jet carrying Rick Hendrick , one of NASCAR's most successful team owners, his wife, Linda , and two pilots ran off a runway in Key West, Fla., on Monday night, but "there were no serious injuries," Hendrick Motorsports said. The G150 airplane was "experiencing brake issues upon landing at Key West International Airport," the team said, adding that all four people "were taken to a local hospital for evaluation. " Four of the leading drivers in NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series drive for Hendrick: reigning champion Jimmie Johnson , Jeff Gordon , Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Mark Martin . The incident occurred seven years after Hendrick's 24-year-old son, Ricky , Hendrick's brother John and two of Hendrick's nieces, along with six others, were killed when their small plane crashed on the way to a race in Martinsville, Va. — Jim Peltz ETC. Fisher says there's no rift in players' union Is there dissension in the NBA players' union?

A helicopter pilot who landed too hard Tuesday at Montgomery Field escaped injury, although the helicopter was damaged, airfield operators said. The landing rendered the craft unable to fly, and it had to be moved from the airfield, said Bill Matson, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman. The pilot was the only one aboard the McDonnell Douglas 500 helicopter, which suffered damage to its undercarriage in the minor accident which occurred around 12:50 p.m.

The safety of the Los Angeles Fire Department's helicopter fleet is again being questioned after a Saturday accident involving a chopper similar to one that crashed in March. Engine failure during a routine training flight at about 9:30 p.m. Saturday forced the pilot to land without power in a canyon north of Pacific Palisades. None of the three firefighters on board were injured, beyond a sprained ankle.

The favorite parlor game among economists these days is to speculate on the possibility of a "hard landing" for the U.S. economy under George Bush--a dramatic crunch in which the postponed consequences of budget and trade deficits suddenly become apparent, retroactively discrediting Ronald Reagan as well as Bush.

The fuselage of an Eastern Airlines DC-9 carrying 104 people cracked open when it made a hard landing, and three people suffered minor injuries, officials said today. The 99 passengers and five-member crew of Flight 573 were evacuated through chutes at Pensacola Regional Airport shortly after the landing at 11:40 p.m. Sunday, said Jack Barker of the Federal Aviation Administration in Atlanta. "I thought it would crash and burn," said passenger Tyrone Taylor.

Billionaire U.S. financier George Soros said the United States was in for a "bouncy and hard" landing as the world's largest economy slows, but his main concern was for spillover turmoil in emerging markets, according to a local newspaper report Sunday. In an interview with Chile's influential El Mercurio newspaper, Soros also said he expects the U.S. Federal Reserve to lower key interest rates aggressively at the start of 2001 but that a new global crisis was inevitable.

A helicopter based at the Marine Corps Air Station in Tustin made a "hard landing" during desert training exercises Friday, injuring all 17 Marines on board, officials said. None of the Marines were listed in serious condition. Although the extent of injuries was not released, officials said three Marines had serious enough injuries that they were flown to the naval hospital at Camp Pendleton for treatment.

Two NATO helicopter crew members had to be rescued Saturday after their helicopter crash landed in eastern Afghanistan, a NATO spokesman said. The cause of the "hard landing" in the Alah Say district of Kapisa province was still under investigation late Saturday, according to Major Michael Johnson, a NATO forces spokesman. Johnson said he could not disclose what type of helicopter crashed or whether it was part of a larger operation in the area. Sabour Wafa, a spokesman for the governor of Kapisa province, said the crash occurred in a nonresidential area and no civilians were injured.

Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people aboard, probably made a hard belly landing and broke up on impact, French investigators said Thursday, citing preliminary evidence. None of the life jackets found by salvage teams were inflated, meaning passengers were not able to prepare for a water landing, said lead investigator Alain Bouillard. He said investigators could not determine whether the passengers were conscious at the time of the crash.

First-week sales of U2's "No Line on the Horizon" brought the superstar rock band back down to Earth. The album, given the band's stature and sales history, was essentially preordained to debut atop the U.S. pop charts. The only question was how many it would sell. The Interscope album sold a brisk 484,000 copies in the U.S., according to data from Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks album sales.

Evel Knievel was a superhero, from the tip of his jumpsuit collar to the bottom of his white boots. He mounted motorcycles, and even a few rocket ships. He leaped cars, buses, rattlesnakes and sharks in a single bound. He wore a cape. Even so, Knievel was no Superman. Underneath the star-spangled get-up, the first son of Butte, Mont., was a tale-telling, philandering ex-con who once smashed another man's arms with a baseball bat. And about those leaps . . .

Out on the great swells of the eastern Mojave Desert, that vast sand sea lying between Barstow and the Colorado River, there is no crumb of history, no tall tale, no arcane bit of knowledge too small to escape Dennis Casebier's notice. "I'm fascinated by who ate rabbits," he said, sitting inside a library that will soon hold his life's work. "Did they eat jack rabbits or cottontails? Did they fry them or roast them? Did they grind them up or make stew out of them?"

China's central bank dismissed predictions that exports would collapse because of the U.S. economic slump, signaling that it may allow further gains in the yuan. "Some think drastically weakening external demand may lead the economy to a hard landing and that we should loosen policies," the bank's financial research institute said in a report. Analysis of exports should be objective and "not exaggerated," it said, adding that a "drastic" slowdown in shipments won't come soon.

Mohamed fikry traverses the globe, buying industrial food-processing equipment. In the process, he's become an American Airlines executive platinum club member, closing in on nearly 5 million miles traveled. Last July, American Flight 136 from Los Angeles International Airport to London's Heathrow Airport began as just another trip for Fikry.

Re "Millions of miles, a hard landing," Column One, March 3 It is despicable that more than six years after 9/11, citizens with skin color remotely resembling Osama bin Laden's are being suspected as terrorists. Mohamed Fikry's terrifying experience on American Airlines is probably not a rare one. It is horrifying to learn that after such treatment, the airline did next to nothing in response. Americans seemed to have unified after 9/11, but many have stereotyped an ethnicity, which is less than American.

Mohamed fikry traverses the globe, buying industrial food-processing equipment. In the process, he's become an American Airlines executive platinum club member, closing in on nearly 5 million miles traveled. Last July, American Flight 136 from Los Angeles International Airport to London's Heathrow Airport began as just another trip for Fikry.