You may 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 (crushed) by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it.
And 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 had 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. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the JATO! The facts as best 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 5seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds 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 dog-fighting 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, then becoming airborne for an additional 1.4 miles and impacting 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 shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.
I have checked this story out - it just did not sound believable to me. First, JATO units do not fire this long. Second, they create so much thrust that unless it was lined up perfectly along the centerline of the vehicle and there was a computer making corrections hundreds of times per second, the car would have gone out of control immediately. This is known as static instability - the tendency of plane (car in this case) to depart straight and level flight and enter uncontrolled flight.
Do a search on 'JATO Car' and you will get back a multitude of hits that all tell this same story - it is all over the net. It is even on The Associated Highway Patrolmen of Arizona Home Page. It is not true - but it is a great story. Wired Magazine, August 2000, published an article explaining how the whole story got started. It seems to make sense - you be the judge.
- Chris Good