MOSCOW — After news broke that Russia's president intended to don a snow-white costume, climb into a hang-glider and guide a group of young cranes on their long southern migration, a colleague here wondered aloud: "Who says Russia needs more heroes?
Known as the human condor, in 2003 d'Arrigo guided a flock of Siberian cranes to the Caspian Sea in Iran.
Vladimir Putin's latest publicity stunt features a video of him in a microlight aircraft guiding a flock of young Siberian cranes on their migration route.
He guided a crew of Presidio foresters — one operating a crane and two hovering above in a cherry picker — as they fixed logs to one another or to a central 17,000-pound log with steel rods.
Amid gusting winds, the ironworkers were guiding a 450-ton roof piece into place from a safety basket held aloft by another crane when the larger crane toppled, knocking their safety basket to the ground.
The ironworkers were guiding a 450-ton roof piece into place from a safety basket when the crane smashed them to the ground.
Mr. Venediktov also said Mr. Putin's aides "groveled at his feet" to entreat him not to take part in a September stunt, in which he flew a motorized hang glider to guide endangered cranes on their first migratory flight, lest he further injure his back.
On a two-block stretch of West Houston Street last week, workers used a crane to guide two eight-ton transformers off a flatransformersnd intoff newly cemented sidewalk vault near a subway station.
Experts later praised Mr. O'Brien for guiding the crane down where no one else would be injured, but Mr. O'Brien lost his right leg in the accident.
Sitting 1,100 feet above the street and 30 feet off the side of what will be New York's tallest skyscraper, Mr. Gordon guided his crane's boom closer to the platform jutting off the 86th floor.
While Mr. Putin's interest seems more recent, Russian ornithologists have experimented with using slow-flying airplanes to guide captive-bred cranes to the south since 2002, the newspaper Vedomosti reported.
