Free Republic

A Northwest Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Boise, Idaho, made an unscheduled landing here Tuesday after an apparently intoxicated passenger became unruly and assaulted others on board, a federal aviation official said. John Kinney, acting federal security director in Billings, said Flight 1279 landed at Billings Logan International Airport shortly after 1 p.m., and that a female passenger was removed and taken into custody. He said the flight was on the ground for nearly 1-1/2 hours before resuming. The woman's name was not immediately released and charges were not immediately filed. Kinney said the plane was over Montana when the...

<p>WOOMERA, South Australia -- Sandwiched between today's cattle-car jumbo jets and tomorrow's suborbital transport, Japan believes there's a niche for a revamped and updated supersonic jet -- say around 2012.</p> <p>Japan's National Aerospace Laboratory (NAL) now has a scale-model mockup of the plane, an 11-meter-long, two-ton beast sitting in the Australian desert, set to be test-flown in early July. Designed exclusively by supercomputer, the NAL has jumped directly from binary equations to flight tests of the new plane -- skipping wind tunnel tests entirely.</p>