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Aircraft designers, forever increasing the capabilities of their planes, must constantly make expensive compromises to take care of the pilot. Until Medico Stapp came along with his cool scientist's insistence on using himself as guinea pig, fighter-planes were built to stand an expected stress of nine gs. It hardly seemed worth while to make them stronger. The human body, the engineers insisted (and most doctors believed), could not take greater physical strain. Not the machine but man himself appeared to be limiting man's conquest of the jet age. However the engineers tried, they could not evade, as Stapp puts it, "that one stubbornly unchanging item peeping forlornly from among the titanium rivets: man, M1, the same yesterday, today and forever; fallible, vulnerable, incurably addicted to errors, and, above all, pathetically mortal." John Paul Stapp has dedicated his life to proving that mortal man is not half so vulnerable as the engineers would have him believe. Stapp thinks that many of man's limitations are not imposed by the body but by the mind. Says he: "Why are we always underrating man? Take, for example, the four-minute mile. For years, we thought that was a physical limit just a bit beyond human reach. Well, it was a psychological limit, and once there was a breakthrough the barrier seemed never to have existed. So it was with the sound barrier—with man enduring Mach 1*— a falsely set limit."
The Needed Proof. Stapp has already demolished some notable false limits on the durability of man's mind and body. He has proved that if pilots are carefully strapped into beefed-up seats and cockpits they can walk away from a large majority of crackups. He has presented his proof with argument-killing logic: his own roaring rides. Having established the practical limits of human tolerance to g forces,† he is getting ready to prove his carefully calculated theory that a jet pilot can stand the wind blast of a bail-out at Mach 3 at 40,000 ft. (about 2,000 m.p.h.), provided he is properly helmeted and harnessed tightly to an ejection seat.
If Space Surgeon Stapp is right, military aircraft operating at that speed and altitude will not need complex and costly ejection capsules to protect escaping pilots. The saving in weight will greatly increase the planes' performance, make them deadlier fighters, give their pilots a greater chance to survive a war in the air and furnish invaluable data for future space flight.
A Sleigh Ride. As far as Stapp is concerned, his theory needs one final bit of proof: a practical demonstration. He is waiting impatiently for the morning when he will get up, as usual, at 4:30 (after working till midnight), breakfast on coffee and an orange, and drive to the track.
First, before he takes one of his rides, he gets a thorough physical examination, including electrocardiogram and X rays. Then, well before blastoff, he begins his preparations for the run. The Fiberglas shell of his helmet is lowered over his head and its cloth neck-shirt zipped shut. Then he wriggles into a blue wool flight suit, puts on thin leather flying gloves and climbs into his seat.