‘World’s Bravest Man’ : A Pioneer in the Art of Survival

A third of a century after he was hailed as “the world’s bravest man,” John Paul Stapp still feels the pain from his historic experiments, but he knows his task is not yet finished.

The old scientist, who laid his own body on the laboratory test bed over and over again, walks slowly now and, at 76, he knows every bone in his body because he personally put some of them back together.

He still travels across the land, preaching--as he has for so many years--that better safety equipment on automobiles can save lives, and serious accidents must not necessarily lead to serious injuries.

He ought to know.

On a breezy afternoon on Dec. 10, 1954, Stapp, then an Air Force colonel, strapped his stout frame onto a hard metal seat in the nose of an open rocket sled called the Sonic Wind II. It was to be the 29th time he had ridden some form of rocket sled down a set of rails, but this ride would be like none other.

‘Outer Limits for Escape’

Stapp, a medical doctor, had been told by the Air Force to find “the outer limits for escape from an aircraft,” as he put it during a recent interview.

That meant he had to learn how much torture the human body could endure in an aerial emergency and survive. The Air Force wanted to know, he said, because it did not want to build cockpits that could sustain heavy damage if the resultant stresses would kill the occupants anyway. The extra weight required to strengthen the cockpits, he noted, would make the aircraft burn more fuel, thus decreasing the pilot’s odds of getting back to safety.

“It was a trade-off,” he said.

That search sent Stapp down one of the most bizarre roads in scientific research. It culminated on a crisp afternoon at Holloman Air Force Base at the edge of the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, near the city of Alamogordo where Stapp and his wife now live.

Precursors to Seat Belts

The strange contraption that Stapp buckled himself into on that afternoon was powered by nine rockets, each capable of 4,500 pounds of thrust. Safety belts--precursors to mandatory seat belts in all U.S. automobiles--were tightened across his chest and around his midriff as an assistant tied his wrists to his knees.

Stapp gripped a protective rubber block between his teeth and listened to the countdown.

“For the 29th time,” he wrote in a report later, “I was alone on a rocket sled, waiting as if for a firing squad. . . .”

At “x minus 15 seconds,” Stapp wrote in the report, “I pressed my back against the thinly padded metal seat back and clenched my teeth on the bite block.”

The nine rockets fired almost simultaneously, ramming a pusher plate into the back of the sled with 40,000 pounds of thrust.

“I could see the ditch between the rails blur and then blackout in 1.5 seconds as the blood was drained backward from my retinas by the forward surge of the sled,” he wrote.

The enormous power of the rockets lasted for only five seconds, but that was long enough to blast Stapp up to 632 miles an hour, far faster than anyone had ever traveled on land and equivalent to supersonic flight at higher altitude. At that speed he would have outrun a .45-caliber bullet fired at his back.

Slammed Sled to Halt

But the test was not in the acceleration. It was in the abrupt stop that awaited Stapp at the end of the 3,500-foot track.

Water breaks near the end of the line slammed the sled to a halt in just 1.4 seconds.

The impact is best told in Stapp’s own words:

“My eyeballs pushed against the upper lids, tugging at their attachments with a searing pain like a dental extraction without anesthetic. Vision flashed through yellow to a salmon-colored blur as the pain mounted to an almost unbearable crescendo. Abruptly . . . the slippers seized on the rails and the sled came to a wrenching stop.

“In five seconds, I had gone from a standstill to 632 miles an hour, and in 1.4 seconds I had crashed to a stop, a crash lasting 18 times longer than that of a car hitting a wall at 60 miles per hour.”

An Air Force flight surgeon rushed to Stapp’s side and “noted that my face was scarlet when the sled stopped, but quickly turned a vivid gray as I seemed to have trouble breathing.”

An attendant slashed at the restraining belts with a knife, but Stapp could not see him.

Rushed to the Hospital

“With no emotion, as though I were an onlooker, I thought: ‘This time I get the white cane and the seeing eye dog.’ ”

He was rushed to the hospital where “a feeling which I describe as survival euphoria filled me with a vindication of having lived to do this thing.”

He remained under observation for five days and was released with two black eyes.

Stapp was described by two national magazines as the world’s bravest man, but he fit the description awkwardly, a middle-aged, slightly paunchy scientist who had never thought of himself as a hero.

The son of Southern Baptist missionaries in Brazil, Stapp had worked his way through college, earning a Ph.D. in biophysics from the University of Texas. He then went on to earn a medical degree at the University of Minnesota during years so lean that he ate some of his own laboratory experiments, according to a longtime friend, Charley Barr of Rancho Palos Verdes.

“He insists to this day that guinea pigs are quite delectable when cooked in a laboratory oven,” Barr said.

Used Own Body in Experiments

Stapp entered the Air Force after medical school and was given his tough assignment. Asked why he insisted on using his own body for so many of the experiments, Stapp answered with the self-deprecating humor that is the hallmark of his style:

“I was told to go out there and do it, and they didn’t send anybody else with me.”

He said he asked for test pilots for the experiments but was turned down because “they were too valuable.”

So he did it himself, beginning at Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave Desert and then moving on to Holloman. In the beginning, crude sleds were used to test relatively low levels of impact, but even those tests were difficult.

“Every one of them hurt,” he recalled.

He broke his right wrist twice in one year.

“I set it myself,” he said.

Even the early tests pushed his body to its near limits, exerting forces 45 times greater than gravity and driving Stapp’s 170-pound body up to 7,650 pounds.

Human Endurance Limits

But the ultimate tests came with the development of the Sonic Wind, the powerhouse of a sled built by Northrop Corp. to test the outer limits of human endurance. Stapp’s final run was not supposed to have been his last, and he had planned to reach speeds of up to 1,000 miles an hour.

Human testing came to an abrupt halt after the 1954 run, however.

The Air Force has never explained why the tests ended with that run, but in a recent interview in San Diego, Stapp told the story.

Shortly after his historic ride, the sled was cranked up once again, but with no one aboard. Engineers wanted to test changes in the propulsion system.

The sled reached 640 miles an hour, but then one of the steel slippers used to hold it on the track split.

The sled tumbled end over end for 1,600 feet across the desert floor.

No one could have survived it, Stapp said.

The Air Force decided there would be no further tests with humans, and “I accepted that,” Stapp said.

Test Ended Seat-Belt Debate

The program continued, using dummies and animals, and in June of 1957 the sled reached a speed of 1,335 miles an hour during a test at China Lake. But no human has ridden it since Stapp’s last ride.

Stapp had already proved his point.

The test ended a debate over whether seat belts could save lives.

“At that time, there were those in high places who cast aspersions on seat belts,” Roy Haeusler, former chief safety engineer for the Chrysler Corp., said in a telephone interview. “They argued that seat belts might cut you in half.”

Stapp’s experiments, Haeusler said, were so conclusive they “shut off that stupid argument.”

With his experiments completed, Stapp turned his attention to auto safety after the Air Force told him that “more men were dying in automobiles than in airplanes.”

Stapp Car Crash Conference

In 1955, he invited experts from the Society of Automotive Engineers to Holloman to see the results of his tests. Today, that meeting is known as the first session of the Stapp Car Crash Conference. The 30th annual conference--which has grown into an international meeting of top safety experts--concluded recently in San Diego.

In 1957, Volvo became the first auto manufacturer in the world to install seat belts as standard equipment, Stapp said, and the results were dramatic.

Volvo subsequently studied accidents involving 39,000 persons, 9,500 of whom were wearing seat belts.

“They (people wearing seat belts) walked away from 70-m.p.h. crashes,” Stapp said. “Without belts, some died at 12 m.p.h.”

Stapp became obsessed with auto safety and in 1959 alone he traveled 170,000 miles, delivering 225 speeches.

Payday came on Sept. 9, 1966, in a Rose Garden ceremony during which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a law requiring seat belts on all new automobiles sold in the United States. The star of the show was auto safety crusader Ralph Nader. But standing off to the side of the ceremony was an unlikely hero who watched with amusement as the press flocked to Nader’s side.

Paid a High Price

“He upstaged the President,” Stapp said, chuckling. “Johnson was furious.”

Stapp has paid a high price for his research. He suffered numerous cracked ribs and a broken tailbone and his eyesight has declined dramatically in recent years.

But when he retired from the Air Force in 1970, Stapp said proudly, it was a normal retirement, not disability. He still smarts over the cruelest cut of all, from a fellow officer, who suggested that Stapp would end up suing the Air Force for injuries.

“I told him I’m not a summer soldier who is going to sue the government for his sunburn,” Stapp snorted.

His many years of research led to numerous advancements in survival equipment for pilots, and improved safety for motorists.

For pilots, that meant better escape mechanisms, safer seat belts and shoulder harnesses, and stronger cockpits to protect the fliers.

Contributed to Auto Safety

For motorists, Stapp’s work contributed to the evolution of automobiles equipped with padded dashboards, seats that were more securely fastened to the car, better bumpers and, of course, mandatory seat belts.

On April 29, 1959, he found out first hand about the value of some of the improvements.

While flying in an Air Force jet, “We ran out of gas 26 miles from Denver.”

The pilot waited too long to eject and was killed, but Stapp ejected when the plane was just 400 feet above the ground.

He was in the air only eight seconds, so his chute “didn’t have much time” to slow him down.

“I never hit the ground so hard in my life. But everything worked perfectly. All those things I had been working on all those years. When I got back to Wright Field I made a speech of just two words:

“It works.”