Orbital Sciences survived by developing a new rocket launched from a far more reliable platform, a jumbo jet.
He was arrested in the United States in August after he aroused suspicion by trying to buy time on a jumbo jet flight simulator.
After all, the strains on a jumbo jet turbine are far greater: 400 takeoff and landing cycles in a year, massive swings in thrust and temperature, sucking in unfiltered air.
Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota on immigration charges a month before the September 11 attacks after he aroused suspicion by trying to buy time on a jumbo jet flight simulator at a flight school.
After a quick meeting and tearful farewell with his family, he is escorted into the first class compartment of a Northwest Airlines jumbo jet for a long flight to Detroit in the U.S. Upon landing, he gets a thorough medical examination by doctors at the Henry Ford Hospital, a clean bill of health, and delivers a speech to a sympathetic audience in New York.
In 1984 he took his biggest gamble yet and launched an airline, with a single Jumbo jet shuttling across the Atlantic.
In 1974, the first crash of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet occurred when a Lufthansa airliner crashed after takeoff at Nairobi airport in Kenya, killing 59 people.
If I had told any of the coaches or players that I was going to trade their jumbo jet for a jumbo ice cream sundae, they would have laughed in my face.
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He was also a senior team leader at Lockerbie when a Pan Am jumbo jet, carrying 258 passengers, crashed on the Scottish Borders town in 1988.
Kennedy airport, when an Air France Airbus A380 clipped the tail fins of a much smaller Comair flight CRJ700, observers and analysts have been asking questions about whether a similar accident could happen elsewhere, and just when a super-large jumbo jet is too big.
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Meanwhile, Airbus's A380 jumbo jet, still a relative newcomer, is showing up on a growing number of routes.
When I visited Alwaleed in Saudi Arabia in October 2008 as the financial crisis was beginning to take hold, I asked him why he ordered the jumbo jet, especially since he already had a fully decked out Boeing 747.
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The aerospace company was on a roll, having recently begun production of its new 747 jumbo jet.
As soon as Airbus announced it was to embark on a project to develop the first "super" jumbo in 2001, it received an order for a private variant of the jet (then known by its codename of A3XX) from a client in the Middle East.
The 43-year-old jumbo jet design still whisks us across oceans and will, I expect, make it to a half-century of service.
The original jumbo jet could carry twice as many passengers as the next largest plane then flying and had a greater range, allowing, for example, a long transatlantic flight without refuelling.
Eldest daughter Siti Hardiyanti Rukmana may have sold her Boeing 747-200 jumbo jet, but the family's fleet of planes included, at least until recently, a DC-10, a blue-and-red Boeing 737, a Canadian Challenger 601 and a BAC-111.
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