NASA Crashes Helicopter Fuselage in Safety Test
Posted on August 30, 2013
NASA crashed a 45-foot-long helicopter fuselage in a safety test. The test involved the use of crash test dummies. The fuselage was dropped about 30 feet using a pendulum swung by cables during the test at NASA Langley's Landing and Impact Research Facility.
The crash helicopter is covered with black polka dots. NASA says the polka dots are for a photographic technique called full field photogrammetry. Each dot represents a data point. High speed cameras track each dot, so after everything is over, researchers can plot the dots and see what happened to every part of the helicopter.
Lead test engineer Martin Annett said in a release, "We have instrumented a former Marine helicopter airframe with cameras and accelerometers. Almost 40 cameras inside and outside of the helicopter will record how 13 crash test dummies react before, during and after impact. Onboard computers will also record more than 350 channels of data.
Some of the dummies made it through the simulated crash okay, but others did not. Take a look: