We regularly crash passenger cars to test their overall safety and design vulnerabilities with the help of high-speed cameras, high technology, and sophisticated crash-test dummies. But we’d NEVER before done that with a full-size passenger aircraft. Until an international team of elite test pilots set out to do just that.
The trick was crashing the plane lightly enough that it didn’t erupt into a fireball (which would have destroyed all their data), but heavily enough to make it break violently apart. The other trick was getting the pilots out of the plane before it crashed. Bonus tidbit: For a few moments, the plane officially became the world’s largest remote-controlled aircraft.
This fascinating documentary details four years of extensive planning and outfitting of the aircraft with hundreds of sensors and state-of-the-art crash dummies, and explains the rationale for the experiment. FYI- The remains of the plane can be seen on Google maps at 32.501293,-115.396698.
