Dr. John Paul Stapp

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This biography was provided by The Air Force Museum,
Wright Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio

 

1950's -- Dr. John Paul Stapp was not only the "fastest human on earth;" he was the quickest to stop. In 1954, America's original Rocketman attained a then-world record land speed of 632 mph, going from a dead stop to a speed faster than that of a .45 caliber bullet in five seconds on an especially-designed rocket sled, and then screeched to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds, sustaining more than 40g's of thrust, all in the interest of safety.

 

Dr. John Paul Stapp

Dr. John Paul Stapp was born July 11, 1910 in Bahia, Brazil, the son of the Rev. and the late Mrs. Charles F. Stapp.

His preliminary education was obtained at the Brownwood High School, Brownwood, Texas, and San Marcos Academy, San Marcos, Texas. Dr. Stapp received his bachelor's degree in 1931 from Baylor University, Waco, Texas; his master of art degree from Baylor in 1932; his doctorate from the University of Texas, Austin, Texas in 1940; and his medical degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn., in 1944. He interned for one year at St. Mary's Hospital, Duluth, Minn.

Dr. Stapp entered the service Oct. 5, 1944. His military assignments were as follows:On Aug. 10, 1946, Dr. Stapp was transferred to the Aero Medical Laboratory as project officer and medical consultant in the Bio-Physics Branch. His first assignment as a project officer included a series of flights testing various oxygen systems in un-pressurized aircraft at 40,000 feet. He was assigned to the deceleration project in March 1947.

 

 

 

 

Service History
Carlisle Barracks	Carlisle, Penn.	Student, Medical Field Service School
Regional Hospital, Lincoln Army Air Base	Lincoln, Neb.	Medical residency
Pratt Army Air Base	Kansas	General duty medical officer
School of Aviation Medicine, Randolph Field	San Antonio, Texas (July 1945)	Obtained Aviation Medical Examiner designation
Pratt Army Air Base	Kansas
Davis-Monthan Army Air Base	Tucson, Ariz.	General duty medical officer and flight surgeon at a separation center.
Kelly Field	San Antonio, Texas	3-week course in industrial medicine
Tinker Air Force Base	Oklahoma City, Okla.	Flight surgeon and industrial medical officer

 

The Deceleration Project

 

Click on Picture to enlarge

Lt Col Stapp with his car circa 1953

Northrop Aircraft team for the G-Whiz tests l-r Ed Swiney- Project Manager, George Nichols- Chief Mechanic, Jake Superata- Asst, Jerry Hollabaugh- Instrumentation Chief, and Ralph DeMarco- Asst.

Final touches on the 'absolutely fearless' Oscar 8-Ball manikin before a sled run

Front view of Stapp as he feels the force of deceleration This frame from a movie camera shows Stapp wearing a helmet designed by Dr. Charles F. Lombard that includes an accelerometer to measure the G forces.

Early picture of the hydraulic brake for the G-Whiz

Oscar 8-Ball tears through a wooden windbrake wall on the G-Whiz sled. This was done to show the forces involved in a rapid deceleration.

As far back as 1945, service personnel realized the need for a comprehensive and controlled series of studies leading to fundamental concepts that could be applied to better safeguard occupants of crashing airplanes. The initial phase of the program, as set up by the Aero Medical Laboratory of the Wright Air Development Center, was to develop equipment and instrumentation whereby airplane crashes might be simulated, and to study the strength factors of seats and harnesses, and human tolerance to the G forces encountered in simulated airplane crashes.

The crash survival research program was originally slated to be conducted near the Aero Medical Laboratory, but Muroc (now Edwards Air Force Base) was chosen because of the existence there of a 2,000-foot track, built originally for V-1 rocket research. That particular program had been completed and was taken over for the deceleration research program to save building a new track.

Designed to Aero Medical Laboratory specifications and fabricated by Northrop Aircraft Inc., of Hawthorne, Calif., equipment was maintained and operated on service contract by the Northrop Company.

The "human decelerator" consisted basically of a 1,500-pound carriage mounted on a 2,000-foot standard gauge railroad track supported on a heavy concrete bed, and a 45-foot mechanical braking system believed to be one of the most powerful ever constructed. Four slippers secured the carriage to the rails while permitting it to slide freely. At the rear of the carriage, 1,000-pound-thrust rockets  provided the propelling force. Braking was accomplished by 45 sets of brakes, each consisting of two clasping pairs of brake surfaces installed on the road bed between the rails. These brake pairs clasped the 11-foot-long braking plates beneath the carriage chassis to apply the desired slowdown or deceleration. By varying the number and pattern of brake sets used and the number of carriage-propelling rockets, it was possible to effect the controlled decelerations to almost any G force.

The first run on the decelerator took place on April 30, 1947, with ballast. The sled ran off the tracks. The first human run took place the following December. Instrumentation on all of the early runs was in the developmental stage, and it was not until August 1948 that it was adequate enough to begin recording. By August 1948, 16 human runs had been made, all in the backward facing position. Forward facing runs were started in August 1949. Most of the earlier tests were run to compare the standard Air Force harnesses with a series of modified harnesses, to determine which type gave the best protection to the pilot.

By June 8, 1951, a total of 74 human runs had been made on the decelerator, 19 with the subjects in the backward position, and 55 in the forward position. Dr. Stapp, one of the most frequent volunteers on the runs, sustained a fracture of his right wrist during the runs on two separate occasions.

Dr. Stapp's findings on the decelerator have been applied to practical use. For instance, the backward facing seat concept, which was known previously, was given great impetus by the officer's crash research program, which proved beyond a doubt that this position was the safest for airplane passengers and required little harness support, and that a human can withstand much greater G forces than in the forward position. As a result, all of the Air Force Military Air Transport Ships (MATS) were equipped with this type seat. Commercial airlines were made aware of these findings. The British  also installed it on many of their military transports.

As a result of Dr. Stapp's findings, the strength requirement for fighter seats was increased considerably (up to 32 Gs) since his work showed that a pilot could walk away from crashes when properly protected by harnesses, and if his seat does not break loose.

The "side saddle" or sideways facing harness was developed also by Dr. Stapp. The new triangular shaped harness gave vastly increased protection to fully-equipped paratroopers sitting side-by-side in Air Force airplanes. It was made of nylon mesh webbing, fit snugly over the shoulder facing the forward part of the airplane, and protected the wearer from the force of crash impacts, takeoffs and landing bumps. It withstood a crash force of approximately 8,000 pounds at 32 G's and was developed to replace the old-fashioned lap belts which gave inadequate protection to their wearers.

By riding the decelerator sled himself, Dr. Stapp demonstrated that a human can withstand at least 45 G's in the forward position, with adequate harness. This is the highest known G force voluntarily encountered by a human. Dr. Stapp believed that the tolerance of humans to G force had not yet been reached in tests, and is, in fact, much greater than ordinarily thought possible.

Also developed by Dr. Stapp as an added safety measure was an improved version of the currently used shoulder strap and lap belt. The new high-strength harness withstood 45.4 G's, compared to the 17 G's, which was the limit that could be tolerated with the old combination. Basically, the new pilot harness added an inverted "V" strap crossing the pilot's thighs added to the standard lap belt and shoulder straps. The leg and shoulder straps and the lap belt all fastened together at one point, and pressure was distributed evenly over the stronger body surfaces, hips, thighs and shoulders, rather than on the solar plexus, as was the case with the old harness.

Dr. Stapp also participated in wind-blast experiments, in which he flew in jet aircraft at high speeds to determine whether or not it was safe for a pilot to remain with his airplane if the canopy should accidentally blow off. Dr. Stapp stayed with his aircraft at a speed of 570 miles per hour, with the canopy removed, and suffered no injurious effects from the wind blasts. He also supervised research programs in the fields of human factors in escape from aircraft and human tolerance to abrupt acceleration and deceleration.

.In the years before his death, Dr. Stapp was president of the New Mexico Research Institute, headquartered in Alamogordo, N.M., as well as chairman of the annual "Dr. Stapp International Car Crash Conference." This event, which is underwritten by several automotive manufacturers, meets to study car crashes and determine ways to make cars safer. In addition, Dr. Stapp was honorary chairman of the Stapp Foundation, which is underwritten by General Motors and provides scholarships for automotive engineering students.

Dr. Stapp died peacefully at his home in Alamagordo, N.M., Nov. 13, 1999. He was 89.

 

 

The Fastest Man On Earth

Editors Note: Although the following article does not deal with ejection seats or egress systems specifically, John Paul Stapp's contribution to the field is a large part of how egress systems are designed to this day. The testing done on the Gee Whiz track and Sonic Wind sleds helped with the design and development of rocket sled testing that is still done to this day for egress systems, albeit the days of a man or animal being strapped to such a sled is in the past.

Wings/Airpower Magazine

Nick T. Spark

Click on Picture to enlarge

Another frame from a film showing the force of deceleration

G-Whiz with full cabin beginning to accelerate

Typical test setup on G-Whiz. Note the telemetry antenna on the circular platform on the windbrake, and the camera below it.

CAPT Stapp and the G-Whiz crew

Test subject gives the O.k. sign before an early G-whiz test

The G-Whiz slamming into the hydraulic brakes with a live subject

Stapp on the G-Whiz sled

Stapp smiles as they strap him into G-Whiz

Stapp (center) and the G-Whiz crew

Stapp strapped to Sonic Wind

Stapp on G-Whiz. Note the photo markings on his cheek, leg and arm.

Stapp strapping into Sonic Wind. Note the lack of windscreen for this test

Stapp on G-Whiz. Note the straps on the helmet, probably to strap it to the seat.

Stapp being prepped for his high speed run on Sonic Wind

Good view of the G-Whiz hydraulic brake system

Setting up the cameras on Sonic Wind (with windscreen installed)

Sonic Wind slamming into the water brake as COL Stapp feels 46.2 Gs of eyeballs-out force

Strapping the helmet to the seat on Sonic Wind

Stapp working on an ejection seat at North American Aviation

Sonic Wind's rocket packs

The G-Whiz track today

Part of the G-Whiz track system today

More of the remnants of the G-Whiz track

Stapp decelerating in the   G-Whiz sled. This five frame 'movie' shows the stress he experienced. Courtesy EAFB History Office

In the spring of 1946, just months after the end of World War II, a B-17 bomber nosed skyward on an urgent mission. Stripped down to a bare airframe, and naked of guns and bombsights, the B-17 had heavily modified engines that allowed it to do something unprecedented: fly into the stratosphere. It cruised for hours at altitudes of nearly 45,000 feet, its flight crew shivering in the sub-zero cold, while in the rear fuselage a lone man conducted a risky set of experiments. Captain John Paul Stapp, a medical doctor and member of the AAF Aero Med Lab, was studying the effects of high altitude flight. And he was using himself as the guinea pig.

The questions Stapp was attempting to answer were absolutely critical to the future of aviation. Could men actually survive for any length of time in extremely high altitudes? Could they fully function, physically and rationally? And how could they keep themselves from freezing, severely dehydrating, or becoming incapacitated by the bends — the deadly formation of bubbles in the bloodstream? These were riddles Stapp was duly bound to solve, and he did, one by one. The riddle of the bends, however, proved an extremely tough nut to crack. But after nearly 65 hours in the air, Capt. Stapp found an answer. If a pilot breathed pure oxygen for thirty minutes prior to takeoff symptoms could be avoided entirely. That was an enormous breakthrough. As far as man was concerned, the sky now truly was the limit.

The discovery pushed Capt. Stapp to the forefront of the Aero Med Lab, a facility he had joined only months before. Once he'd planned to become a pediatrician, but now he had decided to dedicate his life to research. The Lab's mandate, to study medical and safety issues in aviation, was a perfect match for his talents. During WWII it had produced a steady stream of innovations including advanced breathing systems, parachutes, even pressure suits for fighter pilots. And it had emerged as the premiere facility in the world for the study of human factors and the new science of biomechanics.

As a reward for his diligent work on the high altitude problem, Capt. John Stapp was assigned to supervise the Lab's most important research project: human deceleration. This was, simply put, the study of the human body's ability to withstand G forces. (A 'G' is the force of gravity acting on a body on Earth at sea level). According to most sources, 18 Gs was the most a human could receive and expect to survive. As a result, all military airplane cockpits were built to withstand an 18G impact. Yet during the war a great deal of contradictory evidence had emerged about this figure. There were some well documented cases where Navy pilots had crashed into the islands of aircraft carriers or even other aircraft at very high speed. Statistics and physics said they should have been killed. Yet they had walked away. More troubling were a whole host of low magnitude yet fatal crash landings — the Lab routinely reviewed accident reports — in which pilots' seats broke loose or their harnesses failed. Many within the Lab suspected that these pilots had probably survived the initial impact, only to be killed by the structural failure of the cockpit and its affiliated components.

In April 1947, Capt. Stapp traveled out to Los Angeles to view the "human decelerator" being built at Muroc (later Edwards Air Force Base). That remote base was about as far as you could get from Wright Field, but a key component was already in place there: a 2000' long rocket sled track. Built during WWII for tests of Nazi V-1 "buzz bombs", it would form the core of the decelerator. At one end Northrop engineers installed 45 foot-long sets of hydraulic brakes, capable of slowing a rocket sled from 150 miles per hour to half of that speed in one precious fifth of a second. When it did, G forces would be produced equivalent to those experienced in an airplane crash.

The sled that would ride down this track would be called the "Gee Whiz." Built out of welded tubes, it was designed to withstand 100 Gs of force with a 50% safety factor. The 'Whiz was 15' long, 6.5' wide, weighed about 1500 pounds, and sat on a series of magnesium slippers. Atop the chassis was a lightweight metal cab (later removed to facilitate photography) that enclosed a rugged, specially built seat and a bed for prone position tests (also later removed). To the rear was a telemetry antenna mast and a rack capable of holding four rocket bottles. The bottles, the same type used to boost heavy aircraft off short runways, would be capable of generating 5000 pounds of thrust apiece. By varying the number of bottles, and the brake pressure, a wide variety of G forces could be applied to the sled and its occupant.

That occupant, by the way, was intended to be a 185-pound dummy named Oscar Eightball. The staff at the Aero Med Lab had designated in fact that all the tests would be run with dummies; no human runs were contemplated. If 18 G's of force was lethal, after all, then even lower G runs weren't worth the risk. But the Aero Med Lab had reckoned without Stapp, who proved from day one that he was a bit of a maverick. When he first introduced himself to George Nichols, Northrop's project manager, Stapp noticed Oscar Eightball right away. "He walked over and patted that," remembers Nichols, "and then he said, 'We're not going to use these. You can throw this away. I'm going to be the test subject.'"

Nichols was flabbergasted and immediately called his boss, Jack Northrop. Believing the Aero Med Lab must be behind the change in plans, Northrop promptly endorsed human testing. But he also admonished Nichols to "keep track of the fact that our equipment has to withstand the force that you're developing." Oscar Eightball could survive any miscue. With a person riding the sled, the consequences of a failure would be catastrophic.

Before human tests could begin therefore, all the bugs would have to be worked out. In this regard Stapp was nothing if not methodical. He was after all a scientist. So, Oscar would make the first rides on the Gee Whiz. It proved a wise strategy: on the first run, April 30, 1947, the hydraulic brakes and backup restraint system failed, and the 'Whiz slid off the track and into the desert. It wasn't badly damaged, but the brakes were another story. A series of steel teeth intended to trip cams had instead broken clean off on impact. When the teeth were beefed up, George Nichols recalls, the cams broke off instead. It was the type of thing that happened all summer long.

At one point, to learn more about what they might be up against, Oscar Eightball was sent down the track at 150 mph wearing only a light safety belt. At the end of the run the brakes locked up, instantly producing 30 Gs. The belt neatly parted and Oscar, in meek obedience to Newton's Second Law of Motion, sallied forth. He went right through an inch thick wooden windscreen as if it were paper, left his rubber face behind, and finally came to a halt 710 feet downrange. Clearly, some damnable forces of physics were at work.

In December 1947, after eight months and 35 test runs, John Stapp felt his team had obtained enough experience to attempt a manned run. (Perhaps he had also gained some inspiration from Chuck Yeager who, two months earlier, broke the sound barrier in the skies above the sled track. "The real barrier wasn't in the sky," Yeager would later say, "But in our knowledge and experience.") Ever the cautious scientist, on the first ride Stapp used only one rocket, and he faced backwards to minimize the acceleration effects and G-load. It was no sweat. The 'Whiz barely reached 90 miles an hour, and the deceleration was only about 10 Gs. The next day, Stapp added two more rockets and the sled reached 200 mph. Afterwards, it was clear that the Captain had hardly been affected by the ride. In fact if he appeared giddy, it was from anticipation, not fear. The secrets of human deceleration seemed well within his reach.

Within a few weeks' time, Stapp began to vary the number of rockets used on the sled, and tested various braking configurations. The idea was not only increase the G forces involved, but vary the "rate of onset" — the time it took for forces to build to a maximum — and their duration. By August 1948, Stapp had completed sixteen runs, surviving not just 18 G's but a bone-jarring, jaw-dropping 35. And he felt he was still far from any kind of limit.

But while his first run had involved "no unpleasant sensations", the later runs were torturous. Even at low Gs the straps of Stapp's harness dug painfully into his shoulders. At higher ranges of acceleration and deceleration, they cracked his ribs. Over the course of the tests at Edwards, he suffered a number of concussions, lost a few dental fillings and dinged his collarbone. On a couple of other occasions, he broke his wrist. Being a physician and a bit of a stoic, he set one fracture on his way back to his office.

Out of all the things Stapp was subjected to, the most disturbing (concussions aside) was blurry vision, which he began experiencing while facing backwards at speeds above 18 Gs. The cause was intuitively obvious. Blood was rapidly leaving his eyeballs and pooling towards the back of his head in response to gravity, resulting in a "white out." During later tests, when he faced forwards and the blood was pushed up against his retinas, Stapp would experience "red outs" caused by broken capillaries and hemorrhaging. Clearly, when it came to G forces the most vulnerable part of human anatomy were the eyes.

Beaten, bruised and battered though he was by the tests, Stapp initially refused to allow anyone else to ride the 'Whiz. He had his reasons. He feared that if some people, especially test pilots, were allowed on the sled their hot-doggedness might produce a disaster. Volunteers might make some runs — eventually at least seven did – but whenever a new profile was developed, Stapp was his own one and only choice as test subject. There was one obvious benefit at least: Dr. Stapp could write extremely accurate physiological, not to mention psychological, reports concerning the effects of the experiments on his subject, Capt. Stapp.

When after many months the results of all Stapp's work was presented to the Aero Med Lab brass, they were horrified. Surprisingly, the words "court martial" were never mentioned, perhaps because Stapp had shown such courage. His initiative however was another matter entirely. To reign him in, Stapp was promoted to the rank of major, reminded of the 18 G limit of human survivability, and told to discontinue tests above that level. And he was told in no uncertain terms that human tests had to end. Chimpanzees, his superiors advised, would be acceptable substitutes.

Now-Major Stapp retreated back to Edwards with scarcely an argument. He wasn't worried; he sensed that, after the Lab reviewed his data, they would cave. They did. And soon, Stapp's data was having an impact. The rocket sled had clearly proven the inadequacy of certain types of aircraft restraint systems, and these shortcomings were addressed immediately. Stapp had also clearly shown that passengers in rear-facing seats could survive much higher G-loads than forward facing passengers. The military rapidly seized on this concept, and ordered seats on all new transport aircraft reversed.

The most significant development, of course, lay in the debunking of the 18 G limit. When it was finally acknowledged by the Air Force, it had serious implications. If a pilot or passenger could survive a 30 G plus deceleration, then his seat, harness and cockpit ought to be augmented so they could survive it as well. The next series of rocket sled tests, which would feature a new heavyweight harness — permitting the first forward-facing human runs — represented an attempt to produce truly definitive data about that subject. Beginning in June 1949, the Northrop team put the Gee Whiz through various profiles, sometimes with Stapp, sometimes with volunteers, and sometimes with chimpanzees.

Two years later, in June 1951, Stapp made his last run on the Whiz, absorbing more than 35 Gs of deceleration in the forward position. By then he'd also survived a 46 G run with a rate of onset of 500 Gs per second, and a 38 G run with an onset of nearly 1300. That was about as much punishment as the sled could produce with four rockets blazing and with the brakes at their maximum setting. In total, 74 manned runs had been made on the sled. More than 80 additional runs had taken place with the chimps. The tests established a standard strength requirement for aircraft seats (32 G) that was rapidly adopted. And Stapp developed and tested a new regulation pilot's harness, passenger restraints, and invented a "side saddle" harness for paratroopers.

Yet while the Gee Whiz had allowed Stapp to answer most if not all of the crash deceleration questions, new ones had emerged. In 1951, no one had yet ejected from an aircraft at supersonic speed and lived to tell about it. Very little was in fact known about the effects of wind blast and deceleration acting on a pilot ejecting at those speeds. Yet it was obvious that many pilots, whether they wanted to or not, were going to be attempting those kind of escapes in the near future. Could they survive? And what could be done to help them survive?

Answering questions such as those were beyond the limits of the Gee Whiz, and while Stapp did some tests in a special open-cockpit F-89, it was clear that another rocket sled would have to be developed in the search for answers. So beginning in 1953, Stapp relocated to the Aero-medical Field Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. Here there was a 3,550 foot sled track, originally built to test the Snark missile. It terminated in a segment that could be dammed and filled with water. By equipping a sled with water scoops, and varying the water depth precisely, various braking speeds and durations could be produced.

Northrop was put to work constructing a new sled, the Sonic Wind No. 1. Slightly longer and wider than the Gee Whiz, Sonic Wind could carry up to twelve rockets that could produce well over 50,000 pounds of thrust. Additionally, it had a sophisticated two-stage design. After the rocket bottles burned out, the "propulsion sled" would be jettisoned, allowing the "subject sled" to continue onwards without the extra weight. Engineers calculated that the Wind could travel at upwards of 750 supersonic miles per hour, and withstand an astonishing 150 Gs.

In November 1953 the Sonic Wind was tested with Sierra Sam, a second-generation crash test dummy. A few months later in January 1954 the first live subject run was made with a chimpanzee. Everything seemed to work well. On March 19, Lt. Colonel Stapp (he had been promoted again) made his first trip down the track. "I assure you," he said to a reporter as he boarded the sled, "I'm not looking forward to this." Burning six rockets, the Sonic Wind reached a speed of 421 miles per hour in five seconds, and was still traveling at 313 miles an hour when it hit the water brake. In the span of 200 feet, the Wind slowed from that speed to 153 mph, producing up to 22 Gs of force. For a brief instant Stapp's body weighed more than 3,700 pounds. More impressively, for 0.6 seconds, Stapp endured 15 Gs of punishment. That was a duration nearly twice as long as any ever produced at Edwards. "I feel fine," the Lt. Colonel said after the run. "This sled is going to be a wonderful test instrument. I'm ready to do it again this afternoon."

The next human run, however, didn't occur for nearly five months owing to the complexity of the task. Stapp hoped to explore the effects of abrupt wind blast. To do this, a pair of doors was added to the sled's windscreen. Tripped by a cam placed far down the track, they opened at high speed, hitting Stapp with a torrent of air estimated to be moving at 736 feet per second at 5.4 psi. Then he was decelerated 12 Gs. The effects were described as negligible, and Stapp characterized it as the "easiest" sled run he'd ever done. This despite the fact that grains of airborne sand had impacted his face, creating bloody blisters and bruising.

November and the beginning of December were spent preparing for what turned out to be John Stapp's 29th and as it turned out final sled ride. This time he would attempt to push the envelope all the way to the post office. The sled would travel into the transonic speed zone, mach .9. The heavy door mechanism would be removed, and Stapp would face the wind protected only by a helmet and visor. And when the sled stopped, and it would in a mere 1.4 seconds, Stapp would be subjected to more Gs than anyone had ever willingly endured. It made George Nichols extremely apprehensive just thinking about it. Stapp wasn't just out to prove that people could survive a high speed ejection, he was seemingly trying to find the actual limit of human survivability to G force. "To me there was no real justification for being killed from the deceleration," says Nichols. "I didn't want to see it. He was just too good a friend to see get hurt."

Air Force pilot Joe Kittinger, who had been participating in another ground- breaking set of Stapp experiments — flying zero G profiles to study the effects of weightlessness — remembers being asked to fly a photo chase plane for the run. "Stapp said, 'Captain we have a project coming up here in a couple weeks. It's a sled run and we're going to get up to 614 miles per hour'," remembers Kittinger. "But he didn't say it was a human sled run. And he did not tell me it was him." It wasn't until a day before the test that an astonished Kittinger finally learned the truth. "I was flabbergasted he was going to be going that fast," Kittinger says, "It was a point of departure — a new biological limit he was going to be establishing on that run." If he lived, it would be as significant a human achievement as breaking the four minute mile.

At X-minus ten on December 10, 1954, George Nichols helped fit a rubber bite block, equipped with an accelerometer, into John Stapp's mouth. Then with a final pat for good luck, he headed down to the far end of the track. As X-minus two approached, the last two Northrop crew members left the sled and hustled into a nearby blockhouse. Sitting alone atop the Sonic Wind, Stapp looked like a pathetic figure. A siren wailed eerily, adding to the tension, and two red flares lofted skywards. Overhead, pilot Joe Kittinger, approaching in a T-33, pushed his throttle wide open in anticipation of the launch. With five seconds to go Stapp yanked a lanyard activating the sled's movie cameras, and hunkered down for the inevitable shock. The Sonic Wind's nine rockets detonated with a terrific roar, spewing 35-foot long trails of fire and hurtling Stapp down the track. "He was going like a bullet," Kittinger remembers. "He went by me like I was standing still, and I was going 350 mph." Just seconds into the run the sled had reached its peak velocity of 632 miles per hour — actually faster than a bullet — subjecting Stapp to 20 Gs of force and battering him with wind pressures near two tons. "I thought," continues Kittinger, "that sled is going so damn fast the first bounce is going to be Albuquerque. I mean, there was no way on God's earth that sled could stop at the end of the track. No way." But then, just as the sound of the rockets' initial firing reached the ears of far off observers, the Wind hit the water brake. The rear of the sled, its rockets expended, tore away. The front section continued downrange for several hundred feet, hardly slowing at all until it hit the second water brake.

Then, a torrent of spray a hundred feet across exploded out the back of the Sonic Wind. It stopped like it had hit a concrete wall. To Kittinger, flying above and behind, it appeared absolutely devastating. "He stopped in a fraction of a second," Kittinger says, the shock of the moment echoing in his voice. "It was absolutely inconceivable that anybody could go that fast and then just stop, and survive."

Down below, George Nichols and the ground crew raced to the scene, followed by an ambulance. An agitated Nichols vaulted onto the sled, and much to his relief, saw that Stapp was alive. He even managed what looked like a smile, despite being in great pain. Once again, he'd beat the odds. He'd live to see another day.

But could he see? George Nichols wasn't sure, and what he vividly remembers from that day, fifty years later, were John Stapp's eyes. He had suffered a complete red out. "When I got up to the sled I saw his eyes... Just horrible," recalls Nichols, his voice cracking with emotion. "His eyes …were completely filled with blood." When the Sonic Wind had hit the water brake, it had produced 46.2 Gs of force. And for an astonishing 1.1 seconds, Stapp'd endured 25 Gs. It was the equivalent of a Mach 1.6 ejection at 40,000 feet, a jolt in excess of that experienced by a driver who crashes into a red brick wall at over 120 miles per hour. Only it had lasted perhaps nine times longer. And it had burst nearly every capillary in Stapp's eyeballs.

As George Nichols and some flight surgeons helped Stapp into a waiting stretcher, Stapp worried aloud that he'd pushed his luck too far. "This time," he remarked, "I get the white cane and the seeing eye dog." But when surgeons at the hospital examined him, they discovered that Stapp's retinas had not detached. And within minutes, he could make out some "blue specks" and a short time later he could discern one of the surgeons' fingers. By the next day, his vision had returned more or less to normal.

But John Stapp's life would never be the same. Dubbed "The Fastest Man on Earth" and "The Bravest Man in the Air Force" by the media, his celebrity rose to dazzling heights. Stapp graced the pages of Collier's and Life magazines, was the subject of a Hollywood 'B' movie, and was featured in an episode of "This is Your Life!". If the attention was a bit much for the soft spoken Lt. Colonel, it nevertheless provided him with an opportunity he had longed for — to promote the cause of automobile safety.

For even in the earliest days of the Gee Whiz tests, Stapp had realized that his research was just as applicable to cars as it was to airplanes. And perhaps, in the general scheme of things, automobile safety was even more important. At every opportunity, in every interview and at every appearance therefore, Stapp urged Detroit to examine his crash data, and to design their cars with safety in mind. He lobbied hard for the installation of seat belts — at that time not even an option on American cars — and improvements such as soft dashboards, collapsing steering wheels, and shock absorbing bumpers. "I'm leading a crusade for the prevention of needless deaths," he told Time magazine (he made the cover in 1955). It was a cause that would continue the rest of his life.

Meantime, Stapp announced plans to make a Mach 1.0 and, beyond that, a 1000 mph run on the 'Wind. But it was not meant to be. At Mach .9, the safety factor had become too tenuous for the brass to contemplate another go and, as fate would have it, their fears turned out to be justified. In June 1956, while performing an 80 G test, the Sonic Wind left the track and was severely damaged. So if Stapp had traveled as fast as a bullet, he'd also managed to dodge one. Human tests were suspended, and although he would participate in subsequent tests on an air-powered sled known as the "Daisy Track", his days as a rocket man were over.

It didn't really matter. Stapp had already proven what he'd set out to prove: that a pilot, if adequately protected, could survive a high speed, high altitude ejection. And he had determined to a great extent a limit, if not the limit, of human physiology. The rest could be left to the chimpanzees, dummies and, in more modern times, computer simulators. "It was a proper decision to make," says Joe Kittinger about the end of rocket sled tests. "(Stapp) had already defined the limit. Now the engineers could go back and design the escape system so that they could keep the man within that envelope." And they would. Equipped with Stapp's data, engineers would produce a new generation of aircraft which could fly higher, faster, and were safer than any ever built.

They would also build much safer automobiles. Using his powers of persuasion, Stapp convinced the Air Force to built an automobile test facility, and conducted the first-ever crash tests with dummies. He also brought together auto manufacturers, researchers, and politicians for The Stapp Automobile Safety Conference, a groundbreaking symposium which continues to this day. And, when in 1966 President Lyndon Johnson signed a law requiring seat belts in all new cars, Stapp was by his side. So when you put your seatbelt on, just remember that you do so in part because of the "Fastest Man on Earth".

Stapp's work in aeronautics and automobiles continued right up until his death in 1999 at age 89. During his career, he'd received numerous awards and honors, including the Presidential Medal of Technology and the Legion of Merit. But for Stapp, the biggest reward was likely the knowledge that the work he had done helped save so many lives, not just in aviation, but on highways in the United States and around the world. And in that sense, his legacy not only continues, but grows with each passing day.

Nick T. Sparks, the author

EAFB History Office

 

 

Dr. John Paul Stapp

 

An Ameican pioneer of aerospace medicine, famous for his extreme rocket-sled experiments. Stapp was born in Bahia, Brazil, 1910, the son of Southern Baptist missionaries. Aged 12 he moved back to the States and later started college in Texas with the idea of becoming a writer. During Christmas vacation 1928 he witnessed a tragedy that changed his life. While visiting relatives, his baby cousin crawled into a fireplace and was badly burned. For three days before it died, he helped nurse the child and afterward determined to become a doctor. Fifteen years later, having earned degrees in zoology and biophysics, he entered the University of Minnesota medical school to pursue his dream. When he graduated, he interned at St. Mary’s hospital, Duluth, before enlisting in the Army Medical Corps during World War II.

In 1946, Stapp joined the aero-medical laboratory at Wright Field and served as flight surgeon to Chuck Yeager when he broke the sound barrier. Stapp became convinced that a significant pattern lay behind the way some airmen died and others survived seemingly equally violent crashes. To solve the mystery, he used a high-speed sled at Muroc Air Force Base (later known as Edwards AFB).

Stapp planned a series of tests on humans and set out to develop a harness to hold them safely to the rocket-powered sled, known as the "Gee Whiz." First, he used a dummy named "Oscar Eight-Ball" to perfect the harness. Finally, after 32 sled runs, he was ready to try it out on a human guinea pig-himself. He was strapped into the sled facing rearward, refusing anesthetic because he wanted to study his reactions first-hand. Accelerated almost instantly to 90 mph, Stapp was then crushed against the seat back as the sled ground to an abrupt halt. He suffered only a few sore muscles. Within a year, Stapp had made sled runs at up to 150 mph, stopping in as little as 19 ft. He experienced up to 35 times the force of gravity (35g) and proved the human body could withstand such stress, although in the process he suffered headaches, concussions, a fractured rib and wrist, and a hemorrhaged retina.

Stapp during extreme acceleration

When Stapp's commanding officer learned he’d been his own test subject, he ordered the experiments to stop, fearing he'd miss out on promotion if Stapp were killed. However, Stapp secretly continued the tests using chimpanzees and found that when strapped in correctly they survived forces many times those experienced in most plane crashes. From this, he concluded that crash survival doesn’t depend on a body’s ability to withstand the high forces involved, but rather on its ability to withstand the mangling effects of the vehicle. To back up this idea, Stapp again unofficially began tests on humans—putting himself first in the firing line. Over the next four years, he lost fillings, cracked more ribs, and broke his wrist again. Yet, despite these daredevil exploits, Stapp was known as a quiet, philosophical man who loved classical music. He refused to marry until his test days were over.

In 1949, Stapp was involved in the birth of Murphy’s Law. Stapp's harness held 16 sensors to measure the g-force on different parts of the body. There were exactly two ways each sensor could be installed and it fell upon a certain Captain Murphy to make the connections. Before a run in which Stapp was badly shaken up, Murphy managed to wire up each sensor the wrong way, with the result that when Stapp staggered off the rocket sled with bloodshot eyes and bleeding sores, all the sensors read zero. Known for his razor-sharp wit, Stapp quipped: "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way."

The advent of supersonic flight and the need to bail out at very high speed demanded more extreme experiments. Transferred to head the aero-medical field lab at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., Stapp built a much faster sled, called "Sonic Wind No. l." Again, he began his studies using dummies but in March 1954 put himself forward as the subject. In his first ride on the new sled, Stapp reached 421 mph—a new land speed record.

On December 10, he took the sled chair for his final and most extreme ride. His wrists were tied together in front of him, because flapping limbs would be torn away in the ferocious air stream. His major concern was that the rapid deceleration might blind him. Earlier he'd "practiced dressing and undressing with the lights out so if I was blinded I wouldn't be helpless." At the end of the countdown, Stapp was shot to 623 mph in 5 seconds and back to rest in just over a second. Subjected to 40-g, he temporarily blacked out and his eyeballs bulged from their sockets. Rushed to the hospital, his eyesight gradually returned, and a checkup revealed he’d suffered no major injury. An hour later, he was eating lunch.

Later he told the American Rocket Society that experiments with the rocket-powered sled would help pioneer the way to an early fulfillment of human space flight. He subsequently helped run tests on human and animal subjects in the giant Johnsville Centrifuge—the nightmare machine in which the early Mercury astronauts trained. In 1958, he married Lillian Lanese, who had danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo.

Because of his expertise in safety at high speed, the Air Force loaned Stapp to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 1967 as a medical scientist. Upon retirement with the rank of colonel in 1970, he became a professor in the University of California's Safety and Systems Management Center and, later, a consultant to the Surgeon General and to NASA. As chairman of the Stapp Foundation, he led the annual Stapp Car Crash Conference, which brought together automotive engineers, trauma surgeons and other experts to study how people died in car crashes. These conferences continue today.

   SPACE AND AEROSPACE MEDICINE
 

 

Colonel (Dr.) John Paul Stapp

 

Dr. John Paul Stapp was not only the "fastest human on earth;" he was the quickest to stop. In 1954, America's original Rocketman attained a then-world record land speed of 632 mph, going from a dead stop to a speed faster than that of a .45 caliber bullet in five seconds on an especially-designed rocket sled, and then screeched to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds, sustaining more than 40g's of thrust, all in the interest of safety.

Stapp was born in Bahia, Brazil, in 1910 to Baptist missionaries from Texas. He was taught at home until 1922, and then attended Brownwood High School in Brownwood, Texas. He received his bachelor's degree in 1931 and his master's in 1932, both from Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Stapp received his doctorate from the University of Texas in Austin in 1940 and medical degree from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1944. Later that year, after completing his medical internship at St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, Minn., he entered military service. He completed the Medical Field Service School at Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pennsylvania and his medical residency at the Regional Hospital, Lincoln Army Air Base, Lincoln, Neb. He was then assigned to Pratt Army Air Base, Pratt, Kan., as a general duty medical officer.

His first experience with flying and aerospace medicine began in July 1945, when he attended the School of Aviation Medicine at Randolph Field, San Antonio, Texas. But it certainly wasn't his last experience. In 1945, the War Department inaugurated a deceleration project to help resolve a persistent aviation safety problem. Since the dawn of military aviation, non-combat related aircraft crashes had killed a disproportionate number of pilots. Following an interservice conference, military planners authorized the Army and Navy to conduct crash tolerance tests. The doctor volunteered to be a "human decelerator."

A test track was fabricated, maintained and operated by Northrop Aircraft Inc., of Hawthorne, Calif. It consisted of a 1,500-pound carriage mounted on a 2,000-foot standard gauge railroad track supported on a heavy concrete bed and a 45-foot mechanical braking system believed to be one of the most powerful ever constructed. The first run on the decelerator took place April 30, 1947, with ballast. The sled ran off the racks. The first human run took place the following December.

By December 1954, he had volunteered for 29 rocket sled deceleration and windblast experiments, sustaining an average of 25g's. His last run was on a sled named the "Sonic Wind I," especially built for faster speeds and shorter braking distances. At the end of his record-setting ride, Stapp had sustained more than 40g's, the equivalent of hitting a brick wall in a car traveling at 120 mph. He incurred two wrist fractures (the second of which he reset himself while walking back to the Aeromedical Field Laboratory), rib fractures and retinal hemorrhages, but no permanent disability or sustained loss of consciousness.

Was his painful sacrifice worth it? Generations of pilots and everyday automobile drivers still benefit greatly from it. Out of these wild rides came improved helmets, arm and leg restraints, better aircraft seats, stronger safety harnesses and techniques for positioning the body to help absorb unearthly forces. His work also resulted in a bill signed in 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson requiring seatbelts in all new cars.

Stapp is also credited with coining one of the most famous phrases in American history. One of his assistants, Capt. Edward A. Murphy Jr., rigged a harness incorrectly and it failed to register the strains Stapp was being subjected to. After he discovered what happened, Stapp observed that "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong." It's been called "Murphy's Law" ever since.

In 1955, Stapp received the Cheney Award for Valor. The Society of Automotive Engineers sponsors the Stapp Car Crash Conference to promote the continued research and adoption of his concepts of crash survival. He was elected to the Space Hall of Fame and the National Aviation Hall of Fame.

He died in his sleep at his home in Alamogordo, N.M., in 1999. He was 89 years old. Following a memorial ceremony at Brooks Air Force Base, San Antonio, in which a miniature replica of Stapp's famous rocket sled was dedicated, Air Force fighter ace Joe Kittinger remarked, "I hope St. Peter had his seat belt fastened when Dr. Stapp showed up."

 

Obituary of Dr. John Paul Stapp

 

John Paul Stapp, 89, the "Fastest Man on Earth"

By Douglas Martin, courtesy of The New York Times
 

November 16, 1999 - Col. John Paul Stapp, an Air Force medical researcher who rode a rocket-powered sled at a speed faster than a .45-caliber bullet in an experiment to test the limits of human endurance, died on Saturday at his home in Alamogordo, N.M. He was 89.

Stapp was known as the "fastest man on earth" for his 1954 ride, though the speed has since been surpassed, and it was never accepted by auto racing officials as an official land speed record. The speed was impressive, though. Stapp accelerated in five seconds from a standstill to 632 mph. The sled then decelerated to a dead stop in 1.4 seconds, subjecting Stapp to pressures 40 times the pull of gravity.

He became an immediate celebrity. The New York Herald Tribune called him "a gentleman who can stop on a dime and give you 10 cents change."

He won what will perhaps be even more lasting fame in a test five years earlier, when he suffered injuries owing to a mistake by a Capt. Murphy. The result: Murphy's Law.

His 1954 experiment has been compared with being in an automobile crashing into a wall at 50 mph with the shock of the impact lasting 18 times as long. The sudden stop was accomplished with the use of bucket scoops underneath the sled that dug into a trough of water.

How did it feel? "It's like being assaulted in the rear by a fast freight train," Stapp said. What did he think about as he listened to the countdown? "I said to myself, 'Paul, it's been a good life,"' he said.

As it turned out, he was blinded, but recovered his sight in a couple of hours. He ended up with two black eyes because his eyeballs had shot forward in their sockets.

Before the ride he had worried that he might become permanently blind. "I practiced dressing and undressing with the lights out so if I was blinded I wouldn't be helpless," he said in a 1985 interview.

The purpose of this and 28 other high-speed rides was to study the effects of bailing out of airplanes at supersonic speeds and to find ways of keeping pilots safer.

The experiments were just the most famous chapter in Stapp's lifelong mission of testing the limits of human tissue in order to make transportation safer. The results of his research helped in areas as diverse as improving seat belts in cars and developing the medical and psychological tests for choosing the first team of Mercury astronauts.

He became an early advocate of seat belts and shoulder harnesses in cars and argued unsuccessfully that airlines should seat passengers backward so that the entire back could absorb the shock of a sudden stop.

Stapp's views were also sought on the question of whether traveling at the speed of light slowed aging, as Einstein had theorized. He thought not.

Stapp, who was known for his razor-sharp wit, suffered an injury in the experiment that inspired Murphy's Law, after a somewhat less rapid sled ride in 1949.

An assistant, Capt. Edward Murphy Jr., had designed a harness to strap the rider in. The harness held 16 sensors to measure the acceleration, or G-force, on different parts of the body. There were exactly two ways each sensor could be installed. Murphy did each one the wrong way.

The result was that when Stapp staggered off the rocket sled with bloodshot eyes and bleeding sores, all the sensors registered zero. He had been restrained in vain.

A distraught Murphy proclaimed the original version of the famous maxim: "If there are two or more ways to do something and one of those results in a catastrophe, then someone will do it that way."

Stapp was born in Bahia, Brazil, the son of Baptist missionaries. When he was 13, his parents enrolled him in the San Marcos Baptist Academy in Texas. At Baylor University in Waco, Texas, he began majoring in English, but then he nursed a 2-year-old cousin with severe burns.

"It was the first time I had ever seen anyone die," Stapp said. "I decided right then I wanted to be a doctor."

He graduated with a science degree but could not afford to go to medical school, so he stayed at Baylor and earned a master's degree in zoology. He then earned a doctorate in biophysics at the University of Texas. At 29, he entered medical school at the University of Minnesota, where he earned a degree.

In 1944, he joined the Air Force. He became fascinated with "aviation medicine," which addressed the effects that ever-increasing speeds and heights were having on the bodies and minds of fliers.

This led to his assignment in 1947 to Edwards Air Force Base in California, where he began working with a rocket-propelled sled on rails. He used a dummy for the first 32 trial runs before attempting his first ride. The next day he doubled his speed.

He was eventually transferred to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, where he got an even faster sled. Though he had begun to let other volunteers take many of the rides, he suffered broken ribs, hemorrhages in one eye, a concussion, an abdominal hernia, a fractured coccyx and a shattered wrist. Because of concerns about his health, the Air Force grounded him after his fastest ride, overriding his requests that he be allowed to try for 1,000 mph.

Stapp served in medical advisory and staff positions with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, among others. His many awards included the Medal of Technology, presented to him by President Bush in 1991. He was president of the American Rocket Society and wrote more than 50 technical articles.

As chairman of the Stapp Foundation, he led the annual Stapp Car Crash Conference, which brought together automotive engineers, trauma surgeons and other experts to examine how people died in car crashes.

He refused to marry until the rocket sled experiments ended. In 1958, he married Lillian Lanese, who had danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo. She survives him, as does his brother, Wilford, of San Antonio.

Stapp once said that the only lasting effects of his daredevil experiments "are all the lunches and dinners I have to go to now."

 

The Track To Survival

 

By John L. Frisbee, Contributing Editor

Published May 1983, in the Air Force Association Magazine

 

Someone had to find out if a pilot could eject from an airplane at supersonic speed and live.

On Oct. 14, 1947, Capt. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the experimental rocket-propelled X-1. Scientists and engineers now knew that an airplane and its pilot could safely fly faster than the speed of sound. But could a pilot bail out at such speed and survive? That was a question that had to be answered quickly, for USAF's first supersonic fighters were just over the horizon.

It was certain that the wind blast on leaving the cockpit could dislocate limbs and break bones. There also would be rapid--almost instantaneous--deceleration, subjecting the pilot to very high G loads. Some scientists thought the human body could endure no more than 18 Gs, or 18 times the force of gravity--far less than a pilot would experience in a supersonic bailout.

Two approaches to the problem were evident: first, build a complex, heavy, expensive ejection capsule for the pilot; second, find out what stresses an unprotected human could survive. The Air Force assigned the second approach to flight surgeon Lt. Col. John Paul Stapp, a bachelor, with a philosophical bent, a quiet sense of humor, a love of classical music, and unquenchable curiosity.

Under Stapp's direction, Northrop Aircraft Co. built at Edwards (then Muroc) AFB, Calif, a 2,000-foot rail track for a rocket-driven "sled" that could accelerate to nearly 1,000 mph. Toward the end of the track, scoops beneath the sled would dig into a pool of water, jerking the sled from several hundred miles an hour to a stop in just over a second, simulating the deceleration of a high-speed ejection. Early passengers were dummies. At the end of one run, the safety harness broke and the dummy plunged through a one-inch wood windscreen, sailing 700 feet across the desert. A few more rides, a few improvements, and it was time for the first human passenger.

In December 1947, Paul Stapp began riding the sled at increasing speeds. By May of the following year, he had rocketed down the track 16 times and withstood a force of 35 Gs during deceleration. So much for the 18-G limit of human endurance.

What was the sudden stop like? Stapp reported: "It felt as though my eyes were being pulled out of my head.... I lifted my eyelids with my fingers, but I couldn't see a thing.... They put me on a stretcher, and in a minute or two I saw some blue specks.... In about eight minutes ... I saw one of the surgeons wiggle his fingers at me, and I was able to count them. Then I knew my retinas had not been detached, and that I wasn't going to be blind."

Stapp continued to ride the sled at Edwards until 1953, when he was sent to Holloman AFB, N.M., to work with a longer track and an improved sled called Sonic Wind. There, on Dec. 10, 1954, the 44-year-old Stapp rode the sled to a record 632 miles an hour, decelerating to zero in a second and a quarter with a force of more than 40 Gs. Momentarily his body weight was about 6,800 pounds. Wind blast and deceleration were equivalent to a high-altitude ejection at supersonic speed.

Out of these wild rides came improved helmets, arm and leg restraints, better aircraft seats, stronger safety harnesses, and techniques for positioning the body to help absorb unearthly forces. And for Paul Stapp? During his 29 rides came several retinal hemorrhages, cracked ribs, and two broken wrists. The second he set himself while walking back to the Aero Medical Field Laboratory that he headed.

Stapp was named winner of the Cheney Award for 1954. That award recognizes acts of "valor, extreme fortitude, or self-sacrifice in a humanitarian interest performed in connection with aircraft." That same year, he also won AFA's Theodore von Karman Trophy for distinguished service in the field of aerospace science. But for unassuming Paul Stapp, the greatest reward was the knowledge that he had helped make a dangerous profession a little less hazardous--that many jet pilots who had to abandon their planes were still alive and flying.

War is the breeding ground of heroes. In times of peace, few have the opportunity or the dedication and courage to risk permanent injury or death, as Lt. Col. John Paul Stapp did repeatedly, so that others may live. He exemplified in extraordinary measure "the noble quality we call valor."

 For presentation on this web site, some Valor articles have been amended for accuracy.

Air Force Association