According to the New York Post, the 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, October 7, 2012, on Discovery’s “Curiosity” series.
The purpose of the show was 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 newspaper reports that professor of bio-mechanics, 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.”
