Disaster was averted because aircraft managed to communicate with more distant back-up facilities.
Drug problems, he said, "took a distant back seat to the economic issues".
But for pre-meds, such courses have long taken a distant back seat to core science courses.
Wallace the artist and Wallace the conversationalist take a distant back seat to Wallace the eventual suicide.
The film, writes Stephen Holden, "gives character development a distant back seat" to the "mechanics of its formulaic plot".
In practice, government — with its lack of cash and consensus — keeps most of these projects on distant back burners until people actually lose their lives.
The rustic cooking of the region in the heel of Italy takes a distant back seat to the food of noble Tuscany and lusty Naples, and is represented on few menus in New York.
With more than 15,000 motorbikes and only 47,000 people, Tabatinga resembles a small version of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, another chaotic place where cars take a distant back seat as the preferred mode of transportation.
The permanent queen-sized mattress installed at the Airstream's very distant back seemed to placate my wife who, like me but with greater foreboding, had expected to assemble something from many lengths of sofa cushion.
As much as these wonderful actors invest their performances with psychological nuance, their efforts go mostly for naught in a movie that gives character development a distant back seat to the grinding mechanics of its formulaic plot.
The production -- in most respects, a faded fax of the last musical staged by the fabled Gower Champion -- is a full-frontal assault by rat-a-tat tap, with everything else taking a distant back seat.
