BUCKLE UP: On Sunday’s “Curiosity,” they crash a 727 in Laguna Salada, Mexico.
BUCKLE UP: On Sunday’s “Curiosity,” they crash a 727 in Laguna Salada, Mexico. (Discovery Channel)
BUCKLE UP: On Sunday’s “Curiosity,” they crash a 727 in Laguna Salada, Mexico. (
)
This takes “crash and burn” to a whole new level.
Discovery Channel crashed a huge 727 airplane, with test-dummy “passengers,” into the Mexican desert — giving viewers a stomach-churning look at what happens inside this hellish scenario.
The successful test, the first of its kind in nearly 30 years, airs Sunday on Discovery’s “Curiosity” series.
It hopes to answer several questions, including which part of the plane is the safest in which to sit, how someone should sit in the event of a crash (to brace or not to brace?) and whether people can safely evacuate a cabin that’s been severely compromised in a crash of this magnitude.
“The most important thing was that we weren’t going to needlessly risk lives for a stunt — this was going to be a legitimate experiment with takeaway for the science community,” says Howard Swartz, the show’s executive producer and Discovery Channel VP.
The crash-test dummies, along with about two dozen cameras, were placed in various parts of the airplane’s passenger section for the crash — which was theoretically “survivable” and was filmed last April in Laguna Salada, Mexico, about 20 miles southwest of Mexicali.
“NASA had tried this in 1984,” Swartz says. “They practiced it dozens of times, but on the actual day of the crash they lost control on the final approach and the plane erupted into a fireball and all their data was destroyed.”
Not this time.
The 727 used by Discovery, built in 1978 and privately owned for years, was outfitted with 15 crash-test dummies — including three high-tech “Hybrid 3” dummies, which cost $150,000 apiece and were outfitted with 32 sensors to record physiological data.
The plane initially carried six people — a pilot, co-pilot, flight engineer, two tandem jumpers and a jump master — who bailed out in succession, with the pilot bailing out last at a height of 3,000 feet.
From there, the plane was piloted via remote control by a “chase plane” flying around 100 yards away. “The entire experiment came down to four ‘D’ batteries with a remote-control device you could buy at Radio Shack,” Swartz says.
Professor/bio-mechanist Dr. Cindy Bir and survivability expert Dr. Tom Barth, who works for the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), were involved in the project for the four years it took to (literally) get off the ground.
“This was a truly amazing data set and something that’s never been done before,” says Bir. “To actually have a full-size plane and all those dummies collecting data . . . it looks like we’re going to walk away with one or two research papers.
“We saw a little bit of everything,” she says of the post-impact crash scene. “We had dummies in two different zones — ‘braced’ versus ‘unbraced’ — and got a good picture of what happened [to them] upon impact.
“We’ll be analyzing the data for a while,” she says. “All I’ll say is that there are some sections [of the plane] that don’t do as well as others.”