American Notes Milwaukee Flight 105's Final Message; American Notes the Pentagon Calling Out the Reserves

Air controllers at Milwaukee's General Mitchell Field heard the chilling words a few seconds after takeoff. "I have an emergency," said Pilot Dan Martin of Midwest Express Airlines Flight 105. His twin-engine DC-9 was heading for Atlanta on a sunny afternoon with 27 passengers and a crew of four. That radio transmission proved to be Flight 105's last. About 1,000 ft. above the airport, one wing suddenly dipped. Later some witnesses said they heard an explosion. The plane dropped its nose and screamed toward the ground, crashing about a mile and a half from the airport. There were no survivors.

The disaster last Friday added to an estimated civilianaviation death toll of more than 1,500 this year; the worst previous year was 1974, when 1,299 perished. The McDonnell Douglas jet was equipped with Pratt & Whitney JT8D-7 engines, an older model of the engine that apparently caught fire and caused a British Boeing 737 to crash in August. A Pratt & Whitney spokesman said initial information about the Midwest crash provided "no reason to believe it was an engine problem."

AP

When Congress was trying to pare the Pentagon budget last spring, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger suddenly discovered a $1.7 billion surplus resulting from miscalculating the estimated inflation rate. That windfall may be only part of the military's reserves. A study by Congress's General Accounting Office has disclosed that the Pentagon may have amassed an extra $37 billion since fiscal 1982 by exaggerating the effects of inflation.

Arguing that new weapons rise faster in price than do consumer goods, the Pentagon for the past four years has used an inflation index about 30% higher than the Consumer Price Index. But the GAO found that after the impact of contractor cost overruns is subtracted, prices for weapons and other Defense purchases prove to have "increased at about the same rate as prices of all goods in the U.S. economy." Wisconsin Democrat Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, claims the Pentagon used its $37 billion cushion to boost contractor profits and shuffle money to pinched programs. The inflation windfall, Aspin noted, exceeds the total $26.7 billion of cuts in weapons procurement made by Congress since 1981.