www.darwinawards.com

With stuff like this, this has to be my favourite web site ever.  ;D

JATO: Jet Assisted Take-Off Unit
1995 Darwin Award Winner
Confirmed Bogus by Darwin (yet, still a Darwin Award winner  ???)

The Arizona Highway Patrol were mystified when they came upon a pile of smoldering wreckage embedded in the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The metal debris resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it turned out to be the vaporized remains of an automobile. The make of the vehicle was unidentifiable at the scene.

The folks in the lab finally figured out what it was, and pieced together the events that led up to its demise.

It seems that a former Air Force sergeant had somehow got hold of a Jet Assisted Take-Off unit. JATO units are solid-fuel rockets used to give heavy military transport airplanes an extra push for takeoff from short airfields.

Dried desert lakebeds are the location of choice for breaking the world ground vehicle speed record. The sergeant took the JATO unit into the Arizona desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. He attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, accelerated to a high speed, and fired off the rocket.

The facts, as best as could be determined, are as follows:

The operator was driving a 1967 Chevy Impala. He ignited the JATO unit approximately 3.9 miles from the crash site. This was established by the location of a prominently scorched and melted strip of asphalt. The vehicle quickly reached a speed of between 250 and 300 miles per hour and continued at that speed, under full power, for an additional twenty to twenty-five seconds. The soon-to-be pilot experienced G-forces usually reserved for dogfighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners.

The Chevy remained on the straight highway for approximately 2.6 miles (fifteen to twenty seconds) before the driver applied the brakes, completely melting them, blowing the tires, and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface. The vehicle then became airborne for an additional 1.3 miles, impacted the cliff face at a height of 125 feet, and left a blackened crater three feet deep in the rock.

Most of the driver's remains were not recovered; 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.

Ironically, a still-legible bumper sticker was found, reading "How do you like my driving? Dial 1-800-EAT-$HIT."

squirrell,

This story is actually an urban myth.  There was a show on TV about a year ago in which they tried to recreate this "incident" but were not able to create the carnage.

The Darwin story references a '67 Chevy Impala, but this story has been making the rounds since at least 1961 or 1962.

Check out snopes.com for details of this and other urban myths http://www.snopes.com/autos/dream/jato.asp

snopes.com and thestraightdope.com are both excellent sites for unusual information.

The Darwin Awards are unfortunately made up of a lot of myths and aren't really that great.  When the Darwin Awards started making the rounds, most of the people in the newgroups pointed out to the person writing them up, that he was just spreading stuff people knew to be false.  They continued anyways, and managed to get books printed, etc.  

The JATO story was detailed in Wired from Aug 2000.
It was presented as true but with a spirit of 'praise, doubt, delight, sympathy or suspicion' according to the editor's note.
Anyway it gave me alot of laughs on a cross country flight when it first came out.

Thanks for the correction and the Snopes URL.  It's funny what they classify as Urban Legends.  They had one story classified as an urban legend on the Darwin Awards site which I corrected them on, it appears they have removed it now.  It goes to show what someone sez isn't true, isn't always correct.

I once knew a guy who's job was to pick up bodies from accidents, suicides, regular deaths, etc and transport them to the morgue.  He mentioned an incident that happened that although it ended up causing a death, the manner in which it occurred was truly hilarious.  I'll spare you the details, but picture a naked guy and a vacuum and you might get the picture.  :P  Definitely a Darwin Award contender.

National Lampoon magazine in the 1980's had a regular column called "True Facts" that had readers submitting news clips of some pretty outrageous things that were reported in the news.