Word: stapp
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Home at Last. Since then, Stapp has lost six fillings, cracked a few ribs and suffered several retinal hemorrhages. He broke his right wrist a second time, late in 1950, while making a relatively mild 20-g deceleration to test a harness while sitting on a seat-pack parachute. The quick stop threw him forward, the weight of his body thrust against his palms where they rested on handholds. "A severe pain was felt [in] the right forearm," wrote Stapp in his report. "The right wrist had been taped with adhesive because of a previous fracture . . . This tape burst...
...June 1951, Colonel Stapp had done just about all he could with the Edwards sled and track. After a tour of duty at Wright Field, he moved in 1953 to New Mexico's Holloman Air Force Base, where he found no need for "moonlight requisitions." He got a comfortable clutter of laboratory buildings, sufficient equipment and a good staff. Now, the nine officers (including their chief, Stapp) attached to Holloman's Aero-Medical Field Laboratory hold 24 advanced scientific degrees among them...
...Autos, Too. Not all the work at Holloman is concerned with making the jet age safer. Stapp and his men have developed some important safety byproducts for oldfashioned, earthbound, combustion-engine man. Last year the Air Force lost some 700 men in plane crashes and 628 in auto accidents. Faced with this startling statistic, Stapp promptly started a car-crash study program, put dummies into salvaged autos and sent them hurtling into wood and concrete walls...
...shelves should be removed; objects on them have a horrible habit of spewing into passengers' heads during crashes. Power brakes, he suggests, should be operated by hand; the eye-hand reaction is quicker than any foot movement. And safety belts, he thinks, are absolute necessities. This month Colonel Stapp will be traveling to Detroit to congratulate the Automobile Manufacturers Association for incorporating some of his suggestions in their 1956 models...
...aircraft industry has been slower to appreciate the Stapp research. Time and again he has advocated rearward facing seats in transports, argued eloquently that passengers riding backwards would stand a good chance of surviving many crashes. Although he talks with the authority of a man who has lived through such lethal decelerations, he has made surprisingly little headway among private airlines (though passengers in new Air Force transports face the rear...