Its four turboprops provide it with a cruise speed of 0.72 mach at altitudes of up to 40, 000 feet and the plane has excellent low speed handling characteristics needed for paratroopers and load dropping.

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Sorger took a page from his days as a pilot and applied a weight and balance equation to the design, shifting a larger percentage of the load toward the rear wheel, which improved both handling and stability dramatically.

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Coping with that load obliges the European Commission to maintain the largest translation staff in the world, more than 1, 500 people handling about 1.2m pages of text a year.

ECONOMIST: Europe��s languages