Check this out!

The Darwin Award honours the person who did the greatest service to

the

gene pool

by killing themselves in the most stupid manner imaginable.To give

you

an

idea of the calibre of person who wins the annual Darwin Award, the

1994

winner died when he was crushed by the Coke machine he was tilting

towards

himself in an attempt to obtain a free drink from it. The 1995 winner

was,

if we are using the term loosely, a driver.

When the Arizona Highway Patrol spotted a mashed pile of smouldering

wreckage embedded in the side of a cliff, the damage was so great

that

the vehicle

was completely unrecognisable. But from the scale of destruction,

they

thought

it had to have been a plane crash. They were wrong: it was a car.

It took a long time to work out how a car had been so thoroughly

destroyed,

but investigators eventually pieced together the story. The driver

had

somehow

managed to obtain a Jet-Assisted Take-Off unit, known to the US Air

Force

as a JATO. JATOs are used to give heavy military transport planes an

extra

`push' to assist them in taking-off from short runways. They are very

simple devices: they're just solid fuel rockets which, once ignited,

provide a great deal of thrust for around 30 seconds before burning

themselves out. (The solid-fuel

boosters used to launch the Space Shuttle are essentially just very

large JATO

units.)

Having obtained the JATO, the driver drove out into the Arizona

Desert,

found himself a long straight road and attached it to his Chevy. He

then

jumped in, got up to speed and pressed the ignition switch. What

happened next is a mixture of accident investigation, forensic

analysis and speculation. But it went something like this. The

driver

ignited the unit

approximately 3.9 miles from the crash site. This much is known, as

the

rocket melted the asphalt on the road. Assuming that the JATO unit

functioned according to specifications, it would have reached maximum

thrust within approximately five seconds. At this point, the car

would

have been

travelling at a conservative 350 mph. The Chevy would have

maintained

this speed for a

further 20-

25 seconds. The G-forces experienced by the driver would have been

roughly equivalent to those experienced by fighter-pilots using full

after-burners.

The car remained on the road for 2.5 miles. At this point, the driver

applied the brakes. Modern car brakes are extremely efficient, but

they are not generally

designed to slow a vehicle travelling at 350 mph against the

continuing thrust of a

solid-fuel rocket. The brakes melted and the tyres shredded, leaving

investigators a handy marker

for the point at which the brakes were applied.

The braking was not entirely without effect, however, for it is at

this

point police believe the car became airborne. The car climbed gently

through the air for

a further 1.4 miles. We know this because the impact point was in a

cliff face at a

height of 125 feet above ground level. The cliff-face was solid

rock,

but the wreckage

still managed to produce a blackened crater three feet deep.

Very little of the wreckage or driver were recognisable, but

investigators

did manage to isolate a few items. Fragments of bone, teeth and hair

were found in the

crater, and both fingernail and bone silvers were extracted from a

piece of plastic

believed to have once been a steering wheel.

Feargal Brady

Santos Engineering Services Ltd

http://www.santos.ie