Runway

AlliedSignal Aerospace had a busy day yesterday at the Farnborough Air Show in England, announcing a pair of developments that benefit its Communications Systems operation in Towson.A precision runway monitor system developed at the Joppa Road facility won final acceptance from the Federal Aviation Administration for use at the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport.And the British military agreed to purchase customized friend-or-foe identification transponders for certain long-range support helicopters.

WASHINGTON - Controllers at Los Angeles International Airport were stunned this summer when an arriving jumbo jet narrowly missed a domestic flight cleared to take off on the same runway, a reconstruction showed yesterday. "That was close!" said an unidentified voice on the tower radio frequency, seconds after an Asiana Airlines Boeing 747, arriving from Korea, roared over a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 preparing to depart for Albuquerque on Aug. 19, according to tapes released by the National Transportation Safety Board.

In the tradition of the old-fashioned trunk show, home furnishings vendors often stage events to present new fabrics, wallpapers, finishes and more to interior designers hungry for new ideas. The materials typically come in swatches or sample books or even catalogs. But at McLain Wiesand's recent trunk show, the new products were on a runway. For the second year in a row, the Baltimore custom furniture maker put on the event, drawing a crew of home furnishings sales reps to set up displays to pitch their new products.

Laura Cunningham, willow-thin and 17, looks precious in a short khaki dress with baby-blue piping and a matching cardigan. And that, for her, is a problem. "I don't want to be the only one who is adorable," she groans in the fitting room at the Saks Fifth Avenue outlet at Arundel Mills. "Everyone else is funky. I can't be not funky." So the clothes keep pouring in, all a perfect fit yet none of them quite right. And she's got a public to meet tonight. That's when Laura will step down a runway in the senior fashion show at Old Mill High School in Millersville.

NEW YORK -- Who needs superstars? The fashion pack does. That cynical and fickle crowd went as wild as kids on too much Halloween candy when the spots hit Cindy, Linda, Naomi, Shalom and Amber in a tableau that opened Todd Oldham's glamslam show of glitter, sex and '70s style. The excitement didn't let up.Fashion watchers who have been predicting the death of the cult RTC of supermodels may be premature in tolling the bell. These girls may be overpriced and overexposed but until a new crop learns how to work bits of lace the way Naomi does, the fashion industry needs them.

.TC New York -- Men, bless them. When they do fashion, it's nothing like the three-ring circus of the semi-annual women's collections, which are held in tents filled to bursting with paparazzi, star-watchers and crazy couture. American menswear designers, with a few Europeans tossed in, held their first collective fashion showings in Manhattan this week in the cluster of sound stages and recording studios along 54th Street. It all came together in the mix -- centralized, organized and energized.

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- In the moments before the crash of Comair Flight 5191, the pilots and the lone air traffic controller on duty discussed using only one runway - the 7,000-foot one that would have allowed for a safe takeoff. That fact, drawn from cockpit and air tower recordings and revealed yesterday by the National Transportation Safety Board, has only deepened the mystery surrounding the crash: What was the source of the confusion that sent the plane on its fatal course down a shorter runway that it was never meant to be on?

WASHINGTON - A federal safety agency, alarmed by high numbers of near-collisions between planes on U.S. runways, recommended yesterday that pilots stop at every runway intersection - a move that could slow the pace of airport operations. The National Transportation Safety Board also expanded its long-standing call for the Federal Aviation Administration to design a warning system that would keep planes from encroaching on one another while taxiing around an airport. The FAA had no immediate response but said it would take a close look at the safety board's recommendations.

Laura Cunningham, willow-thin and 17, looks precious in a short khaki dress with baby-blue piping and a matching cardigan. And that, for her, is a problem. "I don't want to be the only one who is adorable," she groans in the fitting room at the Saks Fifth Avenue outlet at Arundel Mills. "Everyone else is funky. I can't be not funky." So the clothes keep pouring in, all a perfect fit yet none of them quite right. And she's got a public to meet tonight. That's when Laura will step down a runway in the senior fashion show at Old Mill High School in Millersville.

NEW YORK -- Jay McCarroll sits at the sewing machine in his new studio space in the Garment District last week, making a shirt for Billy Joel's wife. In Bryant Park and elsewhere, designers, retailers and writers were swirling through Fashion Week, that flurry of runway shows and celebrity-studded parties that seems so glamorous to outsiders. But McCarroll, winner of Bravo's Project Runway last season, is ambivalent about his newfound celebrity. He rejects the chicer-than-thou attitude of it all, and just wants to do what he does best - make clothes.