Detroit evening times. (Detroit, Mich) 1921-1958, 1941-12-07

The mans loco. you say. It's just a
publicity stunt.
But there you are wrong for behind that
sensational dive 20 earth through space,
farther than any man has dropped and lived
to tell the tale were the best scientific brains
Of medical schools at the University OF Chi
cago and Northwestern University out OF
the work has come new knowledge about the
human body that will sometime in the future
when the present war ends-make for safer
peacetime flying in transport planes
Not that routine air passengers Of 1888
are going to make parachute jumps from their
stratosphere planes at attitudes OF over 10000
feet as Mr. Starnes has just done But the
knowledge which will bring safer flying for
the future is better understanding OF how
pilots and passengers live. and work
properly when subjected TO the rigors which
modern flying imposes on the human body
More and more scientists realize that man
himself. is the biggest bottleneck in aviation
today. Planes now fly higher than man
can find air to breathe. without special oxygen
equipment to run them. Planes can dive
faster than man withstand the terrific
forces Of gravity which pull at his body and
brain and blood vessels and cause the much
mentioned "blackouts' Of the mind
Guiding modern planes sometimes means
taxing the human body 10 the borderlines of
safety. skirting the thin edge where we'll
being passes over into such strange troubles
as INSTRUMENTATION. aeroembolism and oXy-
gen starvation that nobody even talked about
a few years ago.
All these words. which are really not so
difficult when you get TO know them, are the
-iargor- OF that newest branch Of science known
as aviation medicine The record-shattering
Jump of Arthur Starnes is the newest advance
in this field Of science
IL hic 10 in, &c hqn CC n oh
men like Or A c. Ivy Of Northwestern and
Prof. A. j. Carlson of the University of Chi
cago what happens to the human body as 1t
falls like a living aerial bomb at speeds up
TO 200 miles an hour.
Does a man lose consciousness at these
speeds? Does he feel as if ne were falling,
or does he seem merely to float in space?
Does the world blackout for him?
All these questions and others more COM
pick like heart beat and respiration rate and
blood pressure were all unanswered before
starnes casually stepped out of the plane at
so 800 feet and only pulled the rip cord of his
parachute when he had fallen $4,000 feet,
and was a mere 1 500 feet from the ground.
Many people may be surprised to learn
that Starnes fell no faster than 209 miles an
hour during his sheer drop through space.
They will say What about that law Of
physics which says objects fall faster the
farther they DROP"
The answer to this riddle is air resistance
Air drags on anything falling through the air
and holds il back until it finally reaches some
terminal" velocity depending on its shape.
Only in textbooks is air resistance absent
and under these ideal and hypothetical con-
ditions a bit of figuring shows that Starnes
would have reached speed of $50 miles an
hour when he pulled his rip cord if he had
fallen in a vacuum His speed then would
have been about rs per cent of that of a bullet
Actually at his peak velocity Of 200 miles per
hour Starnes attained a velocity is per cent
of that of a bullet.
AS human aerial bomb dropping through
space, Starnes is less a human being than