U.S. Air Force School Of Aviation Medicine” is a 1958 black-and-white episode of the CBS news magazine show “The Search,” hosted by Charles Romine. The episode focuses on man’s desire to fly faster, farther, and higher than anyone else and the strange problems test pilots encounter in this endeavor (mark 01:45). It opens with a test pilot at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas partaking in an experiment designed to determine the limits of human endurance in flight, followed by an explanation of “aviation medicine” before moving on to a look at the flight suit (mark 05:35) pilots wear to combat changes in air pressure while flying, including a “G-suit.” Mark 09:15 begins an explanation of how to eject a pilot from a jet traveling at supersonic speed, with film footage accompanying the narration.
At mark 12:00, the film turns its focus to Colonel John Paul Stapp, who set a record speed of 632 mph in five seconds on December 10, 1954 when he traveled in a rocket-propelled sled, Sonic Wind no. 1, at the air research and development command’s test center at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico. Romine interviews Stapp beginning at mark 14:27, and at mark 17:17 takes a look at the field of “space medicine” — predicting that “within the next 50 years man will not only make routine flights under space conditions in the vicinity of the Earth but that he will travel to or around the moon” — and how they will deal with weightlessness in their “rocket ship.”
Colonel John Paul Stapp, (July 11, 1910 – November 13, 1999) M.D., Ph.D., was an American career U.S. Air Force officer, flight surgeon, physician, biophysicist, and pioneer in studying the effects of acceleration and deceleration forces on humans. He was a colleague and contemporary of Chuck Yeager, and became known as the fastest man on earth”. Stapp is also known as one of the fathers of “Murphy’s Law” because he was involved in the discovery of the Law at Muroc Air Force Base in the 1940s. (For more information see the article and book “A History of Murphy’s Law”).
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