Books by Ryan, Craig
- Ryan, Craig.
Magnificent Failure.
Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003.
ISBN 978-1-58834-141-9.
-
In his 1995 book, The Pre-Astronauts
(which I read before I began keeping this list), the author
masterfully explores the pioneering U.S. balloon flights into the
upper atmosphere between the end of World War II and the first
manned space flights, which brought both Air Force and Navy
manned balloon programs to an abrupt halt. These flights are little
remembered today (except for folks lucky enough to have an
attic [or DVD] full
of National Geographics from the epoch, which
covered them in detail). Still less known is the story recounted
here: one man's quest, fuelled only by ambition, determination,
willingness to do whatever it took, persuasiveness, and sheer
guts, to fly higher and free-fall farther than any man had ever
done before. Without the backing of any military service, government
agency, wealthy patron, or corporate sponsor, he achieved his first
goal, setting an altitude record for lighter than air flight which
remains unbroken more than four decades later, and tragically died
from injuries sustained in his attempt to accomplish the second,
after an in-flight accident which remains enigmatic and controversial
to this day.
The term “American original” is over-used in
describing exceptional characters that nation has produced,
but if anybody deserves that designation, Nick Piantanida
does. The son of immigrant parents from the Adriatic island
of
Korčula
(now part of Croatia), Nick was born in 1932 and grew up on
the gritty Depression-era streets of Union City, New Jersey in
the very cauldron of the American melting pot, amid
communities of Germans, Italians, Irish, Jews, Poles,
Syrians, and Greeks. Although universally acknowledged to be
extremely bright, his interests in school were mostly
brawling and basketball. He excelled in the latter, sharing
the 1953 YMCA All-America honours with some guy named
Wilt Chamberlain. After belatedly finishing high school
(bored, he had dropped out to start a scrap iron business,
but was persuaded to return by his parents), he joined the
Army where he was All-Army in basketball for both years of
his hitch and undefeated as a heavyweight boxer.
After mustering out, he received a full basketball scholarship
to Fairleigh Dickinson University, then abruptly quit a few months
into his freshman year, finding the regimentation of college
life as distasteful as that of the Army.
In search of fame, fortune, and adventure, Nick next set his sights
on Venezuela, where he vowed to be the first to climb
Devil's Mountain,
from which
Angel Falls
plummets 807 metres. Penniless, he recruited one of his Army buddies
as a climbing partner and lined up sponsors to fund the expedition.
At the outset, he knew nothing about mountaineering, so he taught
himself on the Hudson River Palisades with the aid of books from
the library. Upon arrival in Venezuela, the climbers learnt to
their dismay that another expedition had just completed the first
ascent of the mountain, so Nick vowed to make the first ascent
of the north face, just beside the falls, which was thought
unclimbable. After an arduous trip through the jungle, during which
their guide quit and left the climbers alone, Nick and his partner
made the ascent by themselves and returned to the acclaim of all.
Such was the determination of this man.
Nick was always looking for adventure, celebrity, and the big
score. He worked for a while as a steelworker on the high
iron of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, but most often supported
himself and, after his marriage, his growing family, by contract
truck driving and, occasionally, unemployment checks. Still,
he never ceased to look for ways, always unconventional, to
make his fortune, nor failed to recruit associates and
find funding for his schemes. Many of his acquaintances
use the word “hustler” to describe him in those
days, and one doubts that Nick would be offended by the honorific.
He opened an exotic animal import business, and ordered cobras,
mongooses, goanna lizards, and other critters mail-order from around
the world for resale to wealthy clients. When buyers failed to
materialise, he staged gladiatorial contests of both animal versus
animal and animal versus himself. Eventually he imported a Bengal
tiger cub which he kept in his apartment until it
had grown so large it could put its paws on his shoulders, whence
he traded the tiger for a decrepit airplane (he had earned a pilot's
license while still in his teens). Offered a spot on the New York
Knicks professional basketball team, he turned it down because
he thought he could make more money barnstorming in his airplane.
Nick finally found his life's vocation when, on a lark, he made
a parachute jump. Soon, he had progressed from static line beginner
jumps to free fall and increasingly advanced skydiving, making as
many jumps as he could afford and find the time for. And then he
had the Big Idea. In 1960,
Joseph Kittinger
had ridden a helium balloon to an altitude of 31,333 metres and
bailed out,
using a small drogue parachute to stabilise his fall until he
opened his main parachute at an altitude of 5,330 metres. Although this
was, at the time (and remains to this day) the highest altitude parachute
jump ever made, skydiving purists do not consider it a true free fall jump
due to the use of the stabilising chute. In 1962, Eugene Andreev
jumped from a Soviet balloon at an altitude of 25,460 metres and did
a pure free fall descent, stabilising himself purely by skydiving
techniques, setting an official free-fall altitude record which also
remains unbroken. Nick vowed to claim both the record for highest
altitude ascent and longest free-fall jump for himself, and set about
it with his usual energy and single-minded determination.
Piantanida faced a daunting set of challenges in achieving his
goal: at the outset he had neither balloon, gondola, spacesuit,
life support system, suitable parachute, nor any knowledge of
or experience with the multitude of specialities whose mastery
is required to survive in the stratosphere, above 99% of the
Earth's atmosphere. Kittinger and Andreev were supported by all
the resources, knowledge, and funding of their respective
superpowers' military establishments, while
Nick had—well…Nick. But he was not to be deterred,
and immediately set out educating himself and lining up people,
sponsors, and gear necessary for the attempt.
The story of what became known as Project Strato-Jump reads like
an early Heinlein novel, with an indomitable spirit pursuing
a goal other, more “reasonable”, people considered
absurd or futile. By will, guile, charm, pull, intimidation,
or simply wearing down adversaries until they gave in just to
make him go away, he managed to line up everything he needed, including
having the company which supplied NASA with its Project Gemini
spacesuits custom tailor one (Nick was built like an NBA
star, not an astronaut) and loan it to him for the project.
Finally, on October 22, 1965, all was ready, and Nick took
to the sky above Minnesota, bound for the edge of space.
But just a few minutes after launch, at just 7,000 metres,
the balloon burst, probably due to a faulty seam in the
polyethylene envelope, triggered by a wind shear at that altitude.
Nick rode down in the gondola under its recovery parachute,
then bailed out at 3200 metres, unglamorously landing in the
Pig's Eye Dump in St. Paul.
Undeterred by the failure, Nick recruited a new balloon manufacturer
and raised money for a second attempt, setting off again for the
stratosphere a second time on February 2, 1966. This time the
ascent went flawlessly, and the balloon rose to an all-time record
altitude of 37,643 metres. But as Nick proceeded through the pre-jump
checklist, when he attempted to disconnect the oxygen hose that fed
his suit from the gondola's supply and switch over to the “bail
out bottle” from which he would breathe during the descent,
the disconnect fitting jammed, and he was unable to dislodge it.
He was, in effect, tethered to the gondola by his oxygen line and
had no option but to descend with it. Ground control cut the gondola's
parachute from the balloon, and after a harrowing descent Nick and
gondola landed in a farm field with only minor injuries. The jump
had failed, but Nick had flown higher than any manned balloon
ever had. But since the attempt was not registered as an
official altitude attempt, although the altitude attained is
undisputed, the record remains unofficial.
After the second failure, Nick's confidence appeared visibly shaken.
Having all that expense, work, and risk undertaken come to nought
due to a small detail with which nobody had been concerned prior
to the flight underlined just how small the margin for error was
in the extreme environment at the edge of space and, by implication,
how the smallest error or oversight could lead to disaster. Still, he
was bent on trying yet again, and on May 1, 1966 (since he was trying
to break a Soviet record, he thought this date particularly
appropriate), launched for the third time. Everything went normally
as the balloon approached 17,375 metres, whereupon the ground crew
monitoring the air to ground voice link heard what was described as
a “whoosh” or hiss, followed by a call of
“Emergen” from Nick, followed by silence.
The ground crew immediately sent a radio command to cut the balloon
loose, and the gondola, with Nick inside, began to descend under its
cargo parachute.
Rescue crews arrived just moments after the gondola touched down
and found it undamaged, but Nick was unconscious and unresponsive.
He was rushed to the local hospital, treated without avail, and then
transferred to a hospital in Minneapolis where he was placed in a
hyperbaric chamber where treatment for decompression sickness
was administered, without improvement. On June 18th, he
was transferred to the National Institute of Health hospital in
Bethesda, Maryland, where he was examined and treated by experts in
decompression disease and hypoxia, but never regained consciousness.
He died on August 25, 1966, with an autopsy finding the cause of death
hypoxia and ruptures of the tissue in the brain due to decompression.
What happened to Nick up there in the sky? Within hours after the
accident, rumours started to circulate that he was the
victim of equipment failure: that his faceplate had blown out
or that the pressure suit had failed in some other manner, leading
to an explosive decompression. This story has been repeated so
often it has become almost canon—consider
this
article from Wired from July 2002. Indeed,
when rescuers arrived on the scene, Nick's “faceplate”
was damaged, but this was just the sun visor which can be pivoted
down to cover the pressure-retaining faceplate, which was intact
and, in a subsequent test of the helmet, found to seal perfectly.
Rescuers assumed the sun visor was damaged by impact with part
of the gondola during the landing and, in any case, would not have
caused a decompression however damaged.
Because the pressure suit had been cut off in the emergency room,
it wasn't possible to perform a full pressure test, but meticulous
inspection of the suit by the manufacturer discovered no flaws which
could explain an explosive decompression. The oxygen supply system
in the gondola was found to be functioning normally, with all pressure
vessels and regulators operating within specifications.
So, what happened? We will never know for sure. Unlike a
NASA mission, there was no telemetry, nor even a sequence camera
recording what was happening in the gondola. And yet, within minutes
after the accident occurred, many members of the ground crew came to
a conclusion as to the probable cause, which those still alive today
have seen no need to revisit. Such was their certainty that
reporter Robert Vaughan gave it as the cause in the story he filed
with Life magazine, which he was dismayed to see replaced
with an ambiguous passage by the editors, because his explanation
did not fit with the narrative chosen for the story. (The
legacy media acted like the legacy media even when they were the
only media and not yet legacy!)
Astonishingly, all the evidence (which, admittedly, isn't very much) seems
to indicate that Nick opened his helmet visor at that extreme
altitude, which allowed the air in suit to rush out
(causing the “whoosh”), forcing the air from his lungs (cutting
off the call of “Emergency!”), and rapidly incapacitating
him. The extended hypoxia and exposure to low pressure as the gondola
descended under the cargo parachute caused irreversible brain damage
well before the gondola landed. But why would Nick do such a crazy thing
as open his helmet visor when in the physiological equivalent of space?
Again, we can never know, but what is known is that he'd
done it before, at lower altitudes, to the dismay of his crew, who warned
him of the potentially dire consequences. There is abundant evidence that
Piantanida violated the oxygen prebreathing protocol before high
altitude exposure not only on this flight, but on a regular basis.
He reported symptoms completely consistent with decompression sickness
(the onset of “the bends”), and is quoted as saying that
he could relieve the symptoms by deflating and reinflating his suit.
Finally, about as close to a smoking gun as we're likely to
find, the rescue crew found Nick's pressure visor unlatched and
rotated away from the seal position. Since Nick would have been
in a coma well before he entered breathable atmosphere, it isn't
possible he could have done this before landing, and there is no way
an impact upon landing could have performed the precise sequence
of operations required to depressurise the suit and open the visor.
It is impossible put oneself inside the mind of such an outlier in the
human population as Nick, no less imagine what he was thinking and feeling
when rising into the darkness above the dawn on the third attempt at
achieving his dream. He was almost certainly suffering from symptoms of
decompression sickness due to inadequate oxygen prebreathing, afflicted
by chronic sleep deprivation in the rush to get the flight off, and
under intense stress to complete the mission before his backers grew
discouraged and the money ran out. All of these factors can cloud the
judgement of even the most disciplined and best trained person, and, it
must be said, Nick was neither. Perhaps the larger puzzle is why members
of his crew who did understand these things, did not speak up,
pull the plug, or walk off the project when they saw what was happening.
But then a personality like Nick can sweep people along through its own
primal power, for better or for worse; in this case, to tragedy.
Was Nick a hero? Decide for yourself—my opinion is no.
In pursuing his own ego-driven ambition, he ended up leaving his
wife a widow and his three daughters without a father they
remember, with only a meagre life insurance policy to support
them. The project was basically a stunt, mounted with the goal
of turning its success into money by sales of story, film, and
celebrity appearances. Even had the jump succeeded, it
would have yielded no useful aeromedical research data
applicable to subsequent work apart from the fact that it was
possible. (In Nick's defence on this account, he approached the
Air Force and NASA, inviting them to supply instrumentation and
experiments for the jump, and was rebuffed.)
This book is an exhaustively researched (involving
many interviews with surviving participants in the events)
and artfully written account of this strange episode
which was, at the same time, the last chapter of the
exploration of the black beyond by intrepid men in their
floating machines and a kind of false dawn precursor of
the private exploration of space which is coming to the fore
almost half a century after Nick Piantanida set out to pursue
his black sky dream. The only embarrassing aspect to this
superb book is that on occasion the author equates state-sponsored
projects with competence, responsibility, and merit. Well, let's
see…. In a rough calculation, using 2007 constant dollars,
NASA has spent northward of half a trillion dollars, killing
a total of 17 astronauts (plus other employees in industrial
accidents on the ground), with all of the astronaut deaths due
to foreseeable risks which management failed to identify or mitigate
in time.
Project Strato-Jump, funded entirely by voluntary contributions,
without resort to the state's monopoly on the use of force, set
an altitude record for lighter than air flight within the atmosphere
which has stood from 1966 to this writing, and accomplished it in
three missions with a total budget of less than (2007 constant) US$400,000,
with the loss of a single life due to pilot error. Yes, NASA has achieved
much, much more. But a million times more?
This is a very long review, so if you've made it to this point and
found it tedious, please accept my excuses. Nick Piantanida has
haunted me for decades. I followed his exploits as they happened,
and were reported on the CBS Evening News in the 1960s. I felt the
frustration of the second flight (with that achingly so far and yet
so near view of the Earth from altitude, when he couldn't jump), and
then the dismay at the calamity on the third, then the long vigil
ending with his sad demise. Astronauts were, well, astronauts,
but Nick was one of us. If a truck driver from New Jersey could,
by main force, travel to the black of space, then why couldn't any of
us? That was the real dream of the Space Age:
Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Well,
Nick managed to lay his hands on a space suit and travel he did!
Anybody who swallowed the bogus mainstream media narrative of
Nick's “suit failure” had to watch the subsequent
Gemini and Apollo EVA missions with a special sense of
apprehension. A pressure suit is one of the few things in the
NASA space program which has no backup: if the pressure garment
fails catastrophically, you're dead before you can do anything
about it. (A slow leak isn't a problem, since there's an oxygen
purge system which can maintain pressure until you can get
inside, but a major seam failure, or having a visor blow out or
glove pop off is endsville.) Knowing that those fellows
cavorting on the Moon were wearing pretty much the same suit as
Nick caused those who believed the propaganda version of his
death to needlessly catch their breath every time one of them
stumbled and left a sitzmark or faceplant in the eternal lunar
regolith.
November 2010
- Ryan, Craig.
Sonic Wind.
New York: Livewright Publishing, 2018.
ISBN 978-0-631-49191-0.
-
Prior to the 1920s, most aircraft pilots had no means of escape
in case of mechanical failure or accident. During World War I,
one out of every eight combat pilots was shot down or killed in
a crash. Germany experimented with cumbersome parachutes stored
in bags in a compartment behind the pilot, but these often
failed to deploy properly if the plane was in a spin or became
tangled in the aircraft structure after deployment. Still, they
did save the lives of a number of German pilots. (On the other
hand, one of them was Hermann Göring.) Allied pilots were
not issued parachutes because their commanders feared the loss
of planes more than pilots, and worried pilots would jump rather
than try to save a damaged plane.
From the start of World War II, military aircrews were
routinely issued parachutes, and backpack or seat pack
parachutes with ripcord deployment had become highly
reliable. As the war progressed and aircraft performance
rapidly increased, it became clear that although parachutes
could save air crew, physically escaping from a damaged plane
at high velocities and altitudes was a
formidable problem. The U.S.
P-51
Mustang, of which more than 15,000 were built, cruised at
580 km/hour and had a maximum speed of 700 km/hour. It was
physically impossible for a pilot to escape from the cockpit
into such a wind blast, and even if they managed to do so,
they would likely be torn apart by collision with the fuselage or
tail an instant later. A pilot's only hope was that the plane
would slow to a speed at which escape was possible before
crashing into the ground, bursting into flames, or disintegrating.
In 1944, when the Nazi Luftwaffe introduced the first
operational jet fighter, the
Messerschmitt
Me 262, capable of 900 km/hour flight,
they experimented with explosive-powered
ejection
seats, but never installed them in this front-line fighter.
After the war, with each generation of jet fighters flying
faster and higher than the previous, and supersonic performance
becoming routine, ejection seats became standard equipment in
fighter and high performance bomber aircraft, and saved many
lives. Still, by the mid-1950s, one in four pilots who tried to
eject was killed in the attempt. It was widely believed that
the forces of blasting a pilot out of the cockpit, rapid
deceleration by atmospheric friction, and wind blast at
transonic and supersonic speeds were simply too much for the
human body to endure. Some aircraft designers envisioned
“escape capsules” in which the entire crew cabin
would be ejected and recovered, but these systems were seen to
be (and proved when tried) heavy and potentially unreliable.
John Paul Stapp's family came from the Hill Country of
south central Texas, but he was born in Brazil in 1910
while his parents were Baptist missionaries there. After
high school in Texas, he enrolled in Baylor University
in Waco, initially studying music but then switching
his major to pre-med. Upon graduation in 1931 with a
major in zoology and minor in chemistry, he found that
in the depths of the Depression there was no hope of
affording medical school, so he enrolled in an M.A.
program in biophysics, occasionally dining on pigeons he
trapped on the roof of the biology building and grilled
over Bunsen burners in the laboratory. He then entered
a Ph.D. program in biophysics at the University of
Texas, Austin, receiving his doctorate in 1940. Before
leaving Austin, he was accepted by the medical school
at the University of Minnesota, which promised him
employment as a research assistant and instructor to
fund his tuition.
In October 1940, with the possibility that war in Europe and
the Pacific might entangle the country, the U.S. began
military conscription. When the numbers were drawn from
the fishbowl, Stapp's was 15th from the top. As a
medical student, he received an initial deferment,
but when it expired he joined the regular Army under
a special program for medical students. While
completing medical school, he would receive private's
pay of US$ 32 a month (around US$7000 a year in today's
money), which would help enormously with tuition and
expenses. In December 1943 Stapp received his M.D.
degree and passed the Minnesota medical board examination.
He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the
Army Medical Corps and placed on suspended active duty
for his internship in a hospital in Duluth, Minnesota,
where he delivered 200 babies and assisted in 225
surgeries. He found he delighted in emergency and
hands-on medicine. In the fall of 1944 he went on full
active duty and began training in field medicine. After
training, he was assigned as a medical officer at
Lincoln Army Air Field in Nebraska, where he would
combine graduate training with hospital work.
Stapp had been fascinated by aviation and the exploits
of pioneers such as Charles Lindbergh and the stratospheric
balloon explorers of the 1930s, and found working at an
air base fascinating, sometimes arranging to ride along
in training missions with crews he'd treated in the hospital.
In April 1945 he was accepted by the Army School of Aviation
Medicine in San Antonio, where he and his class of 150
received intense instruction in all aspects of human
physiology relating to flight. After graduation and
a variety of assignments as a medical officer, he was
promoted to captain and invited to apply to the Aero Medical
Laboratory at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio for a research
position in the Biophysics Branch. On the one hand, this
was an ideal position for the intellectually curious Stapp,
as it would combine his Ph.D. work and M.D. career. On
the other, he had only eight months remaining in his
service commitment, and he had long planned to leave the
Army to pursue a career as a private physician. Stapp
opted for the challenge and took the post at Wright.
Starting work, he was assigned to the pilot escape technology
program as a “project engineer”. He protested,
“I'm a doctor, not an engineer!”, but settled
into the work and, being fluent in German, was assigned to
review 1200 pages of captured German documents relating to
crew ejection systems and their effects upon human subjects.
Stapp was appalled by the Nazis' callous human experimentation,
but, when informed that the Army intended to destroy the
documents after his study was complete, took the initiative
to preserve them, both for their scientific content and as
evidence of the crimes of those whose research produced it.
The German research and the work of the branch in which Stapp
worked had begun to persuade him that the human body was far
more robust than had been assumed by aircraft designers and
those exploring escape systems. It was well established by
experiments in centrifuges at Wright and other laboratories that
the maximum long-term human tolerance for acceleration (g-force) without
special equipment or training was around six times that of
Earth's gravity, or 6 g. Beyond that, subjects would lose
consciousness, experience tissue damage due to lack of blood
flow, or structural damage to the skeleton and/or internal
organs. However, a pilot ejecting from a high performance
aircraft experienced something entirely different from a subject
riding in a centrifuge. Instead of a steady crush by, say, 6 g,
the pilot would be subjected to much higher accelerations,
perhaps on the order of 20—40 g, with an onset of
acceleration
(“jerk”)
of 500 g per second. The initial blast of the mortar or rockets
firing the seat out of the cockpit would be followed by a
sharp pulse of deceleration as the pilot was braked from
flight speed by air friction, during which he would be
subjected to wind blast potentially ten times as strong as
any hurricane. Was this survivable at all, and if so, what
techniques and protective equipment might increase a pilot's
chances of enduring the ordeal?
While pondering these problems and thinking about ways to
research possible solutions under controlled conditions,
Stapp undertook another challenge: providing supplemental
oxygen to crews at very high altitudes. Stapp volunteered
as a test subject as well as medical supervisor and
began flight tests with a liquid oxygen
breathing system on high altitude B-17 flights. Crews flying
at these altitudes in unpressurised aircraft during World
War II and afterward had frequently experienced symptoms
similar to
“the
bends” (decompression sickness) which struck divers
who ascended too quickly from deep waters. Stapp diagnosed
the cause as identical: nitrogen dissolved in the blood coming
out of solution as bubbles and pooling in joints and other
bodily tissues. He devised a procedure of oxygen pre-breathing,
where crews would breathe pure oxygen for half an hour before
taking off on a high altitude mission, which completely
eliminated the decompression symptoms. The identical procedure
is used today by astronauts before they begin extravehicular
activities in space suits using pure oxygen at low pressure.
From the German documents he studied, Stapp had become
convinced that the tool he needed to study crew escape was a
rocket propelled sled, running on rails, with a brake mechanism
that could be adjusted to provide a precisely calibrated
deceleration profile. When he learned that the Army was
planning to build such a device at Muroc Army Air Base
in California, he arranged to be put in charge of Project MX-981
with a charter to study the “effects of deceleration
forces of high magnitude on man”. He arrived at Muroc in
March 1947, along with eight crash test dummies to be used in
the experiments. If Muroc (now Edwards Air Force Base) of the
era was legendary for its Wild West accommodations (Chuck Yeager
would not make his first supersonic flight there until October
of that year), the North Base, where Stapp's project was
located, was something out of Death Valley Days. When Stapp arrived
to meet his team of contractors from Northrop Corporation they
struck the always buttoned-down Stapp like a “band of
pirates”. He also discovered the site had no electricity, no running
water, no telephone, and no usable buildings. The Army,
preoccupied with its glamourous high speed aviation projects, had
neither interest in what amounted to a rocket powered train with
a very short track, nor much inclination to provide it the
necessary resources. Stapp commenced what he came to call
the Battle of Muroc, mastering the ancient military art of
scrounging and exchanging favours to get the material he
needed and the work done.
As he settled in at Muroc and became acquainted with his fellow
denizens of the desert, he was appalled to learn that the
Army provided medical care only for active duty personnel,
and that civilian contractors and families of servicemen,
even the exalted test pilots, had to drive 45 miles to the
nearest clinic. He began to provide informal medical care to
all comers, often making house calls in the evening hours on
his wheezing scooter, in return for home cooked dinners. This
built up a network of people who owed him favours, which he
was ready to call in when he needed something. He called
this the “Curbstone Clinic”, and would continue
the practice throughout his career. After some shaky starts
and spectacular failures due to unreliable surplus JATO
rockets, the equipment was ready to begin experiments with
crash test dummies.
Stapp had always intended that the tests with dummies would be
simply a qualification phase for later tests with human and
animal subjects, and he would ask no volunteer to do something
he wouldn't try himself. Starting in December, 1947, Stapp
personally made increasingly ambitious runs on the sled,
starting at “only” 10 g deceleration and building to
35 g with an onset jerk of 1000 g/second. The runs left him
dizzy and aching, but very much alive and quick to recover.
Although far from approximating the conditions of ejection from
a supersonic fighter, he had already demonstrated that the Air
Force's requirements for cockpit seats and crew restraints,
often designed around a 6 g maximum shock, were inadequate and
deadly. Stapp was about to start making waves, and some of the
push-back would be daunting. He was ordered to cease all human
experimentation for at least three months.
Many Air Force officers (for the Air Force had been founded in
September 1947 and taken charge of the base) would have saluted
and returned to testing with instrumented dummies. Stapp,
instead, figured out how to obtain thirty adult chimpanzees,
along with the facilities needed to house and feed them, and
resumed his testing, with anæsthetised animals, up to
the limits of survival. Stapp was, and remained throughout his
career, a strong advocate for the value of animal
experimentation. It was a grim business, but at the time
Muroc was frequently losing test pilots at the rate of one
a week, and Stapp believed that many of these fatalities were
unnecessary and could be avoided with proper escape and
survival equipment, which could only be qualified through animal
and cautious human experimentation.
By September 1949, approval to resume human testing was given,
and Stapp prepared for new, more ambitious runs, with the
subject facing forward on the sled instead of backward as before,
which would more accurately simulate the forces in an ejection or
crash and expose him directly to air blast. He rapidly ramped up
the runs, reaching 32 g without permanent injury. To
avoid alarm on the part of his superiors in Dayton, a “slight
error” was introduced in the reports he sent: all
g loads from the runs were accidentally divided by two.
Meanwhile, Stapp was ramping up his lobbying for safer seats in
Air Force transport planes, arguing that the existing 6 g
forward facing seats and belts were next to useless in many
survivable crashes. Finally, with the support of twenty
Air Force generals, in 1950 the Air Force adopted a new
rear-facing standard seat and belt rated for 16 g which weighed
only two pounds more than those it replaced. The 16 g requirement
(although not the rearward-facing orientation, which proved
unacceptable to paying customers) remains the standard for
airliner seats today, seven decades later.
In June, 1951, Stapp made his final run on the MX-981 sled
at what was now Edwards Air Force Base, decelerating from
180 miles per hour (290 km/h) to zero in 31 feet (9.45
metres), at 45.4 g, a force comparable to many aircraft
and automobile accidents. The limits of the 2000 foot
track (and the human body) had been reached. But Stapp was
not done: the frontier of higher speeds remained. Shortly
thereafter, he was promoted to lieutenant colonel and
given command of what was called the Special Projects
Section of the Biophysics Branch of the Aero Medical
Laboratory. He was reassigned to Holloman Air Force Base
in New Mexico, where the Air Force was expanding its
existing 3500 foot rocket sled track to 15,000 feet
(4.6 km), allowing testing at supersonic speeds.
(The
Holloman
High Speed Test Track remains in service today, having been
extended in a series of upgrades over the years to a total of
50,917 feet (15.5 km) and a maximum speed of Mach 8.6, or
2.9 km/sec [6453 miles per hour].)
Northrop was also contractor for the Holloman sled, and
devised a water brake system which would be more reliable
and permit any desired deceleration profile to be
configured for a test. An upgraded instrumentation system would
record photographic and acceleration measurements with
much better precision than anything at Edwards. The
new sled was believed to be easily capable of supersonic
speeds and was named Sonic Wind. By March
1954, the preliminary testing was complete and Stapp
boarded the sled. He experienced a 12 g acceleration
to the peak speed of 421 miles per hour, then 22 g
deceleration to a full stop, all in less than eight seconds.
He walked away, albeit a little wobbly. He had easily
broken the previous land speed record of 402 miles per hour
and become “the fastest man on Earth.” But
he was not done.
On December 10th, 1954, Stapp rode Sonic Wind,
powered by nine solid rocket motors. Five seconds later,
he was travelling at 639 miles per hour, faster than the
.45 ACP round fired by the M1911A1 service pistol he was
issued as an officer, around Mach 0.85 at the elevation of
Holloman. The water brakes brought him to a stop in 1.37
seconds, a deceleration of 46.2 g. He survived, walked
away (albeit just few steps to the ambulance), and although
suffering from vision problems for some time afterward,
experienced no lasting consequences. It was estimated
that the forces he survived were equivalent to those from
ejecting at an altitude of 36,000 feet from an airplane
travelling at 1800 miles per hour (Mach 2.7). As this
was faster than any plane the Air Force had in service or
on the drawing board, he proved that, given a suitable
ejection seat, restraints, and survival equipment, pilots
could escape and survive even under these extreme
circumstances. The Big Run, as it came to be called, would
be Stapp's last ride on a rocket sled and the last human
experiment on the Holloman track. He had achieved the
goal he set for himself in 1947: to demonstrate that crew
survival in high performance aircraft accidents was a
matter of creative and careful engineering, not the limits
of the human body. The manned land speed record set on the
Big Run would stand until October 1983, when Richard
Noble's jet powered
Thrust2
car set a new record of 650.88 miles per hour in the
Nevada desert. Stapp remarked at the time that Noble had
gone faster but had not, however, stopped from that speed
in less than a second and a half.
From the early days of Stapp's work on human tolerance to
deceleration, he was acutely aware that the forces experienced
by air crew in crashes were essentially identical to those in
automobile accidents. As a physician interested in public
health issues, he had noted that the Air Force was losing more
personnel killed in car crashes than in airplane accidents. When
the Military Air Transport Service (MATS) adopted his
recommendation and installed 16 g aft-facing seats in its
planes, deaths and injuries from crashes had fallen by
two-thirds. By the mid 1950s, the U.S. was suffering around
35,000 fatalities per year in automobile
accidents—comparable to a medium-sized war—year in
and year out, yet next to nothing had been done to make
automobiles crash resistant and protect their occupants in case
of an accident. Even the simplest precaution of providing lap
belts, standard in aviation for decades, had not been taken;
seats were prone to come loose and fly forward even in mild
impacts; steering columns and dashboards seemed almost designed
to impale drivers and passengers; and “safety” glass
often shredded the flesh of those projected through it in a
collision.
In 1954, Stapp turned some of his celebrity as the fastest man
on Earth toward the issue of automobile safety and organised, in
conjunction with the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), the
first Automobile Crash Research Field Demonstration and
Conference, which was attended by representatives of all of the
major auto manufacturers, medical professional societies, and
public health researchers. Stapp and the SAE insisted that the
press be excluded: he wanted engineers from the automakers free
to speak without fear their candid statements about the safety
of their employers' products would be reported sensationally.
Stapp conducted a demonstration in which a car was towed into a
fixed barrier at 40 miles an hour with two dummies wearing
restraints and two others just sitting in the seats. The belted
dummies would have walked away, while the others flew into the
barrier and would have almost certainly been killed. It was at
this conference that many of the attendees first heard the term
“second collision”. In car crashes, it was often
not the crash of the car into another car or a barrier that
killed the occupants: it was their colliding with dangerous
items within the vehicle after flying loose following the
initial impact.
Despite keeping the conference out of the press, word of
Stapp's vocal advocacy of automobile safety quickly
reached the auto manufacturers, who were concerned both
about the marketing impact of the public becoming aware
not only of the high level of deaths on the highways but
also the inherent (and unnecessary) danger of their
products to those who bought them, and also the
bottom-line impact of potential government-imposed safety
mandates. Auto state congressmen got the message, and
the Air Force heard it from them: the Air Force threatened
to zero out aeromedical research funding unless car crash
testing was terminated. It was.
Still, the conferences continued (they would eventually
be renamed “Stapp Car Crash Conferences”), and Stapp
became a regular witness before congressional committees
investigating automobile safety. Testifying about whether
it was appropriate for Air Force funds to be used in studying
car crashes, in 1957 he said, “I have done autopsies
on aircrew members who died in airplane crashes. I have
also performed autopsies on aircrew members who died in
car crashes. The only conclusion I could come to is that
they were just as dead after a car crash as they were
after an airplane crash.” He went on to note
that simply mandating seatbelts in Air Force ground
vehicles would save around 125 lives a year, and if they
were installed and used by the occupants of all cars in
the U.S., around 20,000 lives—more than half the
death toll—could be saved. When he appeared
before congress, he bore not only the credentials of
a medical doctor, Ph.D. in biophysics, Air Force colonel,
but the man who had survived more violent decelerations
equivalent to a car crash than any other human.
It was not until the 1960s that a series of mandates
were adopted in the U.S. which required seat belts,
first in the front seat and eventually for all passengers.
Testifying in 1963 at a hearing to establish a National
Accident Prevention Center, Stapp noted that the Air Force,
which had already adopted and required the use of seat
belts, had reduced fatalities in ground vehicle accidents
by 50% with savings estimated at US$ 12 million per year.
In September 1966, President Lyndon Johnson signed two
bills, the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety
Act and the Highway Safety Act, creating federal agencies
to research vehicle safety and mandate standards. Standing
behind the president was Colonel John Paul Stapp: the
long battle was, if not won, at least joined.
Stapp had hoped for a final promotion to flag rank before
retirement, but concluded he had stepped on too many toes
and ignored too many Pentagon directives during his career
to ever wear that star. In 1967, he was loaned by the Air Force
to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to
continue his auto safety research. He retired from the
Air Force in 1970 with the rank of full colonel and in
1973 left what he had come to call the “District
of Corruption” to return to New Mexico. He continued
to attend and participate in the Stapp Car Crash Conferences,
his last being the Forty-Third in 1999. He died at his
home in Alamogordo, New Mexico in November that year at
the age of 89.
In his later years, John Paul Stapp referred to the survivors
of car crashes who would have died without the equipment
designed and eventually mandated because of his research as
“the ghosts that never happened”. In 1947, when
Stapp began his research on deceleration and crash survival,
motor vehicle deaths in the U.S. were 8.41 per 100 million
vehicle miles travelled (VMT). When he retired from the
Air Force in 1970, after adoption of the first round of
seat belt and auto design standards, they had fallen to
4.74 (which covers the entire fleet, many of which were
made before the adoption of the new standards). At the time of
his death in 1999, fatalities per 100 million VMT were 1.55,
an improvement in safety of more than a factor of five.
Now, Stapp was not solely responsible for this, but it was
his putting his own life on the line which showed that
crashes many considered “unsurvivable” were
nothing of the sort with proper engineering and knowledge
of human physiology. There are thousands of aircrew and
tens or hundreds of thousands of “ghosts that never
happened” who owe their lives to John Paul Stapp. Maybe
you know one; maybe you are one. It's worth a moment
remembering and giving thanks to the largely forgotten man
who saved them.
February 2020