by Mary Roach
Could airlines do a better job of making their planes fire-safe? You bet they could. They could install more emergency exits, but they won’t, because that means taking out seats and losing revenue. They could install sprinkler systems or build crashworthy fuel systems of the type used on military helicopters. But they won’t, because both these options would add too much weight. More weight means higher fuel costs.
Who decides when it’s okay to sacrifice human lives to save money? Ostensibly, the Federal Aviation Administration. The problem is that most airline safety improvements are assessed from a cost-benefit viewpoint. To quantify the “benefit” side of the equation, a dollar amount is assigned to each saved human life. As calculated by the Urban Institute in 1991, you are worth $2.7 million. “That’s the economic value of the cost of somebody dying and the effects it has on society,” said Van Goudy, the FAA man I spoke with. While this is considerably more than the resale value of the raw materials, the figure in the benefits column is rarely large enough to surpass the airlines’ projected costs. Goudy used the example of shoulder harnesses, which I had asked him about. “The agency would say, ‘All right, if you’re going to save fifteen lives over the next twenty years by putting in shoulder straps, that’s fifteen times two million dollars; that’s thirty million.’ The industry comes back and says, ‘It’s gonna cost us six hundred and sixty-nine million to put the things in.’” So long, shoulder straps.
Why doesn’t the FAA then come back and say, “Tough tiddlywinks. You’re putting them in anyway”? For the same reason it took fifteen years for the government to begin requiring air bags in cars. The regulatory agencies have no teeth. “If the FAA wants to promulgate a regulation, they have to provide the industry with a cost-benefit analysis and send it out for comment,” says Shanahan. “If the industry doesn’t like what they see, they go to their congressmen. If you’re Boeing, you have a tremendous influence in Congress.”*
To the FAA’s credit, the agency recently approved a new “inerting” system that pumps nitrogen-enriched air into fuel tanks, reducing the levels of highly flammable oxygen and the likelihood of an explosion such as the one that brought down Flight 800.
I ask Dennis whether he has any advice for the people who’ll read this book and never again board a plane without wondering if they’re going to wind up in a heap of bodies at the emergency exit door. He says it’s mostly common sense. Sit near an emergency exit. Get down low, below the heat and smoke. Hold your breath as long as you can, so you don’t cook your lungs and inhale poisonous fumes. Shanahan prefers window seats because people seated on the aisle are more likely to get beaned with the suitcases that can come crashing through the overhead bin doors in even a fairly mild impact.
As we wait for the bill, I ask Shanahan the question he gets asked at every cocktail party he’s been to in the past twenty years: Are your chances of surviving a crash better near the front of the plane or the back? “That depends,” he says patiently. “on what kind of crash it’s going to be.” I rephrase the question. Given his choice of anywhere on the plane, where does he prefer to sit?
“First class.”
6
THE CADAVER WHO JOINED THE ARMY
The sticky ethics of bullets and bombs
For three days in January of 1893 and again for four days in March, Captain Louis La Garde of the U.S. Army Medical Corps took up arms against a group of extraordinary foes. It was an unprecedented military undertaking, and one for which he would forever after be remembered. Though La Garde served as a surgeon, he was no stranger to armed combat. In the Powder River Expedition of 1876, he had been decorated for gallantry in confronting tribes of hostile Sioux. La Garde had led the charge against Chief Dull Knife, whose name, we can only assume, was no reflection on his intellectual and military acumen or the quality and upkeep of his armaments.
La Garde received his strange and fateful orders in July of 1892. He would be receiving, the letter said, a new, experimental .30-caliber Springfield rifle. He was to take this rifle, along with his standard-issue .45-caliber Springfield, and report to Frankford Arsenal, Pennsylvania, the following winter. Taking shape in the rifles’ sights would be men, a series of them, naked and unarmed. That they were naked and unarmed was the less distinctive thing about them. More distinctive was that they were already dead. They had died of natural causes and had been collected—from where is not revealed—as subjects in an Army Ordnance Department experiment. They were to be suspended from a tackle in the ceiling of the firing range, shot at in a dozen places and with a dozen different charges (to simulate different distances), and autopsied. La Garde’s mission was to compare the physiological effects of the two different weapons upon the human body’s bones and innards.
The United States Army was by no means the first to sanction the experimental plugging of civilian cadavers. The French army, wrote La Garde in his book Gunshot Injuries, had been “firing into dead bodies for the purpose of teaching the effects of gunshots in war” since around 1800. Ditto the Germans, who went to the exquisite trouble of propping up their mock victims al fresco, at distances approximating those of an actual battlefield. Even the famously neutral Swiss sanctioned a series of military wound ballistics studies on cadavers in the late 1800s. Theodore Kocher, a Swiss professor of surgery and a member of the Swiss army militia (the Swiss prefer not to fight, but they are armed, and with more than little red pocket knife/can openers), spent a year firing Swiss Vetterli rifles into all manner of targets—bottles, books, water-filled pig intestines, oxen bones, human skulls, and, ultimately, a pair of whole human cadavers—with the aim of understanding the mechanisms of wounding from bullets.
Kocher—and to a certain extent La Garde—expressed a desire that their ballistics work with cadavers would lead to a more humanitarian form of gun battle. Kocher urged that the goal of warfare be to render the enemy not dead, but simply unable to fight. To this end, he advised limiting the size of the bullets and making them from a material of a higher melting point than lead, so that they would deform less and thus destroy less tissue.
Incapacitation—or stopping power, as it is known in munitions circles—became the Holy Grail of ballistics research. How to stop a man in his tracks, preferably without maiming or killing him, but definitely before he maimed or killed you first. Indeed, the next time Captain La Garde and his swinging cadavers took the stage, in 1904, it was in the name of improved stopping power. The topic had been high on the generals’ to-do lists following the army’s involvement in the Philippines, during the final stage of the Spanish-American War, where its Colt .38s had failed, on numerous occasions, to stop the enemy cold. While the Colt .38 was considered sufficient for “civilized” warfare—“even the stoical Japanese soldier,” wrote La Garde in Gunshot Injuries. “fell back as a rule when he was hit the first time”—such was apparently not the case with “savage tribes or a fanatical enemy.” The Moro tribesman of the Philippines was considered a bit of both: “A fanatic like a Moro, wielding a bolo in each hand who advances with leaps and bounds…must be hit with a projectile having a maximum amount of stopping power,” wrote La Garde. He related the tale of one battle-enlivened tribesman who charged a U.S. Army guard unit. “When he was within 100 yards, the entire guard opened fire on him.” Nonetheless, he managed to advance some ninety-five yards toward them before finally crashing to the ground.
La Garde, at the War Department’s urging, undertook an investigation of the army’s various guns and bullets and their relative efficacy at putting a rapid halt to enemies. He decided that one way to do this would be to fire at suspended cadavers and take note of the “shock,” as estimated by “the disturbance which appeared.” In other words, how far back does the hanging torso or arm or leg swing when you shoot it? “It was based on the assumption that the momentum of hanging bodies of various weights could somehow be correlated and measured, and that it actually meant something with regard to stopping power,” says Evan Marshall, who wrote the book on handgun st
opping power (it’s called Handgun Stopping Power). “What it actually did was extrapolate questionable data from questionable tests.”
Even Captain La Garde came to realize that if you want to find out how likely a gun is to stop someone, you are best off trying it on an entity that isn’t already quite permanently stopped. In other words, a live entity. “The animals selected were beeves about to undergo slaughter in the Chicago stock-yards,” wrote La Garde, deeply perplexing the ten or fifteen people who would be reading his book later than the 1930s, when the word “beeves,” meaning cattle, dropped from everyday discourse. Sixteen beeves later, La Garde had his answer: Whereas the larger-caliber (.45) Colt revolver bullets caused the cattle to drop to the ground after three or four shots, the animals shot with smaller-caliber .38 bullets failed even after ten shots to drop to the ground. And ever since, the U.S. Army has gone confidently into battle, knowing that when cows attack, their men will be ready.
For the most part, it has been the lowly swine that has borne the brunt of munitions trauma research in the United States and Europe. In China—at the No. 3 Military Medical College and the China Ordnance Society, among others—it has been mongrel dogs that get shot at. In Australia, as reported in the Proceedings of the 5th Symposium on Wound Ballistics, the researchers took aim at rabbits. It is tempting to surmise that a culture chooses its most reviled species for ballistics research. China occasionally eats its dogs, but doesn’t otherwise have much use or affection for them; in Australia, rabbits are considered a scourge—imported by the British for hunting, they multiplied (like rabbits) and, in a span of twenty years, wiped out two million acres of south Australian brush.
In the case of the U.S. and European research, the theory doesn’t hold. Pigs don’t get shot at because our culture reviles them as filthy and disgusting. Pigs get shot at because their organs are a lot like ours. The heart of the pig is a particularly close match. Goats were another favorite, because their lungs are like ours. I was told this by Commander Marlene DeMaio, who studies body armor at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP). Talking to DeMaio, I got the impression that it would be possible to construct an entire functioning nonhuman human from pieces of other species. “The human knee most resembles the brown bear’s,” she said at one point, following up with a surprising or not so surprising statement: “The human brain most resembles that of Jersey cows at about six months.”* I learned elsewhere that emu hips are dead ringers for human hips, a situation that has worked out better for humans than for emus, who, over at Iowa State University, have been lamed in a manner that mimics osteonecrosis and then shuttled in and out of CT scanners by researchers seeking to understand the disease.
Had I been calling the shots back at the War Department, I would have sanctioned a study not on why men sometimes fail to drop to the ground after being shot, but on why they so often do. If it takes ten or twelve seconds to lose consciousness from blood loss (and consequent oxygen deprivation to the brain), why, then, do people who have been shot so often collapse on the spot? It doesn’t happen just on TV.
I posed this question to Duncan MacPherson, a respected ballistics expert and consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department. MacPherson insists the effect is purely psychological. Whether or not you collapse depends on your state of mind. Animals don’t know what it means to be shot, and, accordingly, rarely exhibit the instant stop-and-drop. MacPherson points out that deer shot through the heart often run off for forty or fifty yards before collapsing. “The deer doesn’t know anything about what’s going on, so he just does his deer thing for ten seconds or so and then he can’t do it anymore. An animal with a meaner disposition will use that ten seconds to come at you.” On the flip side, there are people who are shot at but not hit—or hit with nonlethal bullets, which don’t penetrate, but just smart a lot—who will drop immediately to the ground. “There was an officer I know who took a shot at a guy and the guy just went flat, totally splat, facedown,” MacPherson told me. “He said to himself, ‘God, I was aiming for center mass like I’m supposed to, but I must have gotten a head shot by mistake. I’d better go back to the shooting range.’ Then he went to the guy and there wasn’t a mark on him. If there isn’t a central nervous system hit, anything that happens fast is all psychological.”
MacPherson’s theory would explain the difficulties the army had in La Garde’s day with the Moro tribesmen, who presumably weren’t familiar with the effects of rifles and kept on doing their Moro tribesman thing until they couldn’t—owing to blood loss and consequent loss of consciousness—do it anymore. Sometimes it isn’t just ignorance as to what bullets do that renders a foe temporarily impervious. It can also be viciousness and sheer determination. “A lot of guys take pride in their imperviousness to pain,” MacPherson said. “They can get a lot of holes in them before they go down. I know an LAPD detective who got shot through the heart with a .357 Magnum and he killed the guy that shot him before he collapsed.”
Not everyone agrees with the psychological theory. There are those who feel that some sort of neural overload takes place when a bullet hits. I communicated with a neurologist/avid handgunner/reserve deputy sheriff in Victoria, Texas, named Dennis Tobin, who has a theory about this. Tobin, who wrote the chapter “A Neurologist’s View of ‘Stopping Power’” in the book Handgun Stopping Power, posits that an area of the brain stem called the reticular activating system (RAS) is responsible for the sudden collapse. The RAS can be affected by impulses arising from massive pain sensations in the viscera.* Upon receiving these impulses, the RAS sends out a signal that weakens certain leg muscles, with the result that the person drops to the ground.
Somewhat shaky support for Tobin’s neurological theory can be found in animal studies. Deer may keep going, but dogs and pigs seem to react as humans do. The phenomenon was remarked upon in military medical circles as far back as 1893. A wound ballistics experimenter by the name of Griffith, while going about his business documenting the effects of a Krag-Jorgensen rifle upon the viscera of live dogs at two hundred yards, noted that the animals, when shot in the abdomen. “died as promptly as though they had been electrocuted.” Griffith found this odd, given that, as he pointed out in the Transactions of the First Pan-American Medical Congress. “no vital part was hit which might account for the instantaneous death of the animals.” (In fact, the dogs were probably not as promptly dead as Griffith believed. More likely, they had simply collapsed and looked, from two hundred yards, like dead dogs. And by the time Griffith had walked the two hundred yards to get to them, they were in fact dead dogs, having expired from blood loss.)
In 1988, a Swedish neurophysiologist named A. M. Göransson, then of Lund University, took it upon himself to investigate the conundrum. Like Tobin, Göransson figured that something about the bullet’s impact was causing a massive overload to the central nervous system. And so, perhaps unaware of the similarities between the human brain and that of Jersey cows at six months, he wired the brains of nine anesthetized pigs to an EEG machine, one at a time, and shot them in the hindquarters. Göransson reports having used a “high-energy missile” for the task, which is less drastic than it suggests. What it suggests is that Dr. Göransson got into his car, drove some distance from his laboratory, and launched the Swedish equivalent of Tomahawk missiles at the hapless swine, but in fact, I am told, the term simply means a small, fast-moving bullet.
Instantly upon being hit, all but three of the pigs showed significantly flattened EEGs, the amplitude in some cases having dropped by as much as 50 percent. As the pigs had already been stopped in their tracks by the anesthesia, it is impossible to say whether they would have been rendered so by the shots, and Göransson opted not to speculate. And if they had lost consciousness, Göransson had no way of knowing what the mechanism was. To the deep chagrin of pigs the world over, he encouraged further study.
Proponents of the neural overload theory point to the “temporary stretch cavity” as the source of the effect. All bullets, upon entry
into the human form, blow open a cavity in the tissue around them. This cavity shuts back up almost immediately, but in that fraction of a second that it is agape, the nervous system, they believe, issues a Mayday blast—enough of one, it seems, to overload the circuits and cause the whole system to hang a Gone Fishing sign on the door.
These same proponents believe that bullets that create sizable stretch cavities are thus more likely to deliver the necessary shock to achieve the vaunted ballistics goal of “good stopping power.” If this is true, then in order to gauge a bullet’s stopping power, one needs to be able to view the stretch cavity as it opens up. That is why the good Lord, working in tandem with the Kind & Knox gelatin company, invented human tissue simulant.
I am about to fire a bullet into the closest approximation of a human thigh outside of a human thigh: a six-by-six-by-eighteen-inch block of ballistic gelatin. Ballistic gelatin is essentially a tweaked version of Knox dessert gelatin. It is denser than dessert gelatin, having been formulated to match the average density of human tissue, is less colorful, and, lacking sugar, is even less likely to please dinner guests. Its advantage over a cadaver thigh is that it affords a stop-action view of the temporary stretch cavity. Unlike real tissue, human tissue simulant doesn’t snap back: The cavity remains, allowing ballistics types to judge, and preserve a record of, a bullet’s performance. Plus, you don’t need to autopsy a block of human tissue simulant; because it’s clear, you just walk up to it after you’ve shot it and take a look at the damage. Following which, you can take it home, eat it, and enjoy stronger, healthier nails in thirty days.
