Darwin Award Winner

The Darwin Awards


The annual honor given to the person who did the gene pool the biggest service by killing themselves in the most extraordinarily stupid way. Last year's winner was the fellow who was killed by a Coke machine which toppled over on top of him as he was attempting to tip a free soda out of it.


And 1996's winner true story is as follows: The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. The lab finally figured out what it was and what had happened. It seems that a guy had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take Off - actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra "push" for taking off from short airfields.


He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the JATO unit. The facts as best as could be determined are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 4.0 miles from the crash site. This was established by the prominent scorched and melted asphalt at that location. The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached maximum thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well in excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for an additional 20-25 seconds.


The driver, soon to be pilot, most likely would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for dog-fighting F-14 fighter pilots under full afterburners, basically causing him to become two dimensional for the remainder of his trip. The automobile, surprisingly, remained on the straight highway for about 2.5 miles (15-20) seconds before the driver, applied and instantly, melted the brakes. Not suprisingly, the now blown tires left thick rubber marks on the road surface just before he became airborne for an additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at a height of 125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock.


It is estimated that the driver hit the cliff face at a whopping 468 mph, the average cruising speed of a DC-9. Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable; however, small fragments of bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the crater and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.