Word: gs
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...first he slows down gradually because the thin air has little grip on him, but as soon as he reaches the denser air below 200,000 ft., he runs into the painful gravity increase caused by deceleration. This may rise to the dangerous figure of 7 Gs. It may rise even higher if the pilot's capsule has so little air resistance that it gains considerable speed from the pull of the earth before it slams against dense...
Into a Brick Wall. In a stunting airplane, where the G-forces last for several seconds, a sitting pilot can take about ten Gs, when he is dressed in a special suit to keep the blood from being drained from his brain. A man on the Air Force sled can take more for shorter periods. How much he can take depends on his position and how his body is supported...
When the passenger (not dressed in special clothing) is lying on the sled-head foremost-he can take only seven Gs for Moth of a second without being damaged. If he is lying feet foremost, he can stand as much as 32 Gs because the feet can take more impact than the head. When his body is at right angles to the motion of the sled, he can survive even more...
Champion G-survivor, so far, is Lieut. Colonel John P. Stapp, a husky flight surgeon whose sled rocketed at 175 m.p.h. before being braked. He was strapped facing backward in a specially built seat, which is what saved him. He took 46.8 Gs for .008 seconds (equivalent to running an automobile into a solid brick wall at 120 m.p.h.). His body at the moment of impact weighed close to four tons, and his blood was more than three times as heavy as mercury...
Practical Results. Colonel Flickinger believes that human tolerance might be increased to 90 or 100 Gs if the passenger took the impact lying transversely to the sled's motion on a properly contoured support. But he does not believe that this experiment will be tried soon. "It is not possible," he says, "to build that much tolerance into the hardware...