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Airborne in a car?
By Wallace G. Loewen, (wgl@psnw.com)
You all know about the Darwin Awards-It's an annual honor given to the
person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves
in the most extraordinarily stupid way. Last year's winner was the
fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him
while he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it.
This year's nominee is:
The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering
metal embedded in the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex
of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but
it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. The lab
finally figured out what it was and what happened. It seems that a guy
had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take Off-actually a
solid fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes
an extra "push" for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his
Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of
road. (Not long enough.) Then he attached the JATO unit to his car,
jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the JATO ! The facts as best
as could be determined are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit JATO
ignition at a distance of approximately 3.0 miles from the crash site.
This was established by the prominent scorched and melted asphalt at
that location. The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached
maximum thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach a speed well
in excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for an additional
20-25 seconds. The driver, soon to be pilot, most likely would have
experienced G-forces usually reserved for dogfighting F-14 jocks under
full afterburners, basically causing him to become insignificant for
the remainder of the event. However, the automobile remained on the
straight highway for about 2.5 miles (15-20 seconds) before the driver
applied and completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving
thick rubber marks on the road surface. He, then, became airborne for
an additional 1.4 miles and impacted the cliff face at a height of 125
feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock. Most of the
driver's remains were not recoverable; however, small fragments of bone,
teeth and hair were extracted from the crater and fingernail and bone
chards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of
the steering wheel.
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