- Jun 12, 2014
- 12,920
- 32,558
Founding Member
Driver killed. Looks to me like either a premature deployment of one of the chutes or some malfunction with the engines destroying the chutes.
Circa 1998, my buddy Droopy and I took two devil's vaginas (aka Harriers) up to Muskeegon MI for an airshow. While Droopy was off wowing the crowd with his airborne feats of daring-do, I was happily drinking beer and ogling the hotties. Anyway, after the briefing let out before the show, I went up to Kent Shockley and asked him if he ever took passengers along. He said "Sure, meet me at the truck at noon and I'll get you a helmet." So off I went.
The entire evolution was pretty much pure insanity. The 'helmet' was laughable....it was barely more than an old football helmet that was 2 sizes too big for me. I didn't figure the helmet, or lack thereof, would really make much difference in a crash anyway, so I threw it on and climbed aboard.
It was amazing how "stock" the truck itself was. The mechanical parts such as the steering and brakes were all pretty much stock components. No solid rubber tires or anything like that either, just regular old truck tires (good ones though!). The main difference was that there was a fairly robust roll cage inside the cab. The strangest thing about the setup was that the cab had no floor....when you were in the seat you had a place to rest your feet on a roll cage tube, but underneath you were looking right at the asphalt.
The real horror about this particular ride came immediately after he started the first engine. It was at that instant that I realized my normal practice of flying without earplugs wasn't going to cut it...at all. To make matters worse, there was no intercom. So the only way to communicate was with hand signals, the totality of which consisted of either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. There was no way to tell him I was going to be deafened other than to basically shut down the ride. I was somehow able to stick my fingertips up under the sides of the helmet just enough to keep the truck from rupturing my eardrums. I spent the next 20 minutes or so like this.
If you've seen the show, you know he likes to get the crowd all lathered up by 'popping' the afterburners and shooting out a giant wall of flame behind the truck. Let me tell you, when you're inside this thing and he does that, its like a cannon is going off. And although from a distance the truck doesn't seem to move, every one of these 'burner pops' is a big kick in the pants as the trucks lurches forward like someone just kicked you in the spine.
Finally out to the runway where we stage for the 'race' against the stunt plane. Some guy flys by us in a Extra about 30' off the ground, and as he's heading down the runway I'm thinking "Go go go, we're gonna lose!" Hahahaha, shut up fool! As the extra gets about 1500 feet down the runway in front of us, Kent jams the throttles forward and its like we just made the jump into hyperspace. The nearest thing I can compare it to was a catapult shot that lasted like 7 seconds. We reeled in that Extra like it was standing still....hell I could barely focus on it. Kent is over there in the left seat just steering that thing like he's hauling a load of hay down eye-one-oh 'bout a mile outta shaky-town.
At this point I thought I had witnessed the most impressive thing I would ever see in my life. Then he slams the throttles to idle and the chutes deploy, and the previous 7 seconds took a back seat to the neck-snapping decel that came when the chutes popped open. If I had been wearing sunglasses, I have no doubt they would have shot straight ahead with enough force to shatter the windscreen. In about 15 seconds, we had gone from zero to 250mph back down to easy taxi speed in less than 6000 feet of runway.
As fun as it was, when he shut down those engines back in the line, the sense of relief was overwhelming. I really thought I was going to have near total permanent hearing loss after that, but I could at least hear good enough afterward to know someone was talking to me and by the next day I had most of my hearing back.
Anyway, Kent was a super nice guy to me that day and I'll never forget that ride. It sounds like the driver who died today was somebody else, not sure if ol' Kent is still around or what.
Circa 1998, my buddy Droopy and I took two devil's vaginas (aka Harriers) up to Muskeegon MI for an airshow. While Droopy was off wowing the crowd with his airborne feats of daring-do, I was happily drinking beer and ogling the hotties. Anyway, after the briefing let out before the show, I went up to Kent Shockley and asked him if he ever took passengers along. He said "Sure, meet me at the truck at noon and I'll get you a helmet." So off I went.
The entire evolution was pretty much pure insanity. The 'helmet' was laughable....it was barely more than an old football helmet that was 2 sizes too big for me. I didn't figure the helmet, or lack thereof, would really make much difference in a crash anyway, so I threw it on and climbed aboard.
It was amazing how "stock" the truck itself was. The mechanical parts such as the steering and brakes were all pretty much stock components. No solid rubber tires or anything like that either, just regular old truck tires (good ones though!). The main difference was that there was a fairly robust roll cage inside the cab. The strangest thing about the setup was that the cab had no floor....when you were in the seat you had a place to rest your feet on a roll cage tube, but underneath you were looking right at the asphalt.
The real horror about this particular ride came immediately after he started the first engine. It was at that instant that I realized my normal practice of flying without earplugs wasn't going to cut it...at all. To make matters worse, there was no intercom. So the only way to communicate was with hand signals, the totality of which consisted of either a thumbs up or a thumbs down. There was no way to tell him I was going to be deafened other than to basically shut down the ride. I was somehow able to stick my fingertips up under the sides of the helmet just enough to keep the truck from rupturing my eardrums. I spent the next 20 minutes or so like this.
If you've seen the show, you know he likes to get the crowd all lathered up by 'popping' the afterburners and shooting out a giant wall of flame behind the truck. Let me tell you, when you're inside this thing and he does that, its like a cannon is going off. And although from a distance the truck doesn't seem to move, every one of these 'burner pops' is a big kick in the pants as the trucks lurches forward like someone just kicked you in the spine.
Finally out to the runway where we stage for the 'race' against the stunt plane. Some guy flys by us in a Extra about 30' off the ground, and as he's heading down the runway I'm thinking "Go go go, we're gonna lose!" Hahahaha, shut up fool! As the extra gets about 1500 feet down the runway in front of us, Kent jams the throttles forward and its like we just made the jump into hyperspace. The nearest thing I can compare it to was a catapult shot that lasted like 7 seconds. We reeled in that Extra like it was standing still....hell I could barely focus on it. Kent is over there in the left seat just steering that thing like he's hauling a load of hay down eye-one-oh 'bout a mile outta shaky-town.
At this point I thought I had witnessed the most impressive thing I would ever see in my life. Then he slams the throttles to idle and the chutes deploy, and the previous 7 seconds took a back seat to the neck-snapping decel that came when the chutes popped open. If I had been wearing sunglasses, I have no doubt they would have shot straight ahead with enough force to shatter the windscreen. In about 15 seconds, we had gone from zero to 250mph back down to easy taxi speed in less than 6000 feet of runway.
As fun as it was, when he shut down those engines back in the line, the sense of relief was overwhelming. I really thought I was going to have near total permanent hearing loss after that, but I could at least hear good enough afterward to know someone was talking to me and by the next day I had most of my hearing back.
Anyway, Kent was a super nice guy to me that day and I'll never forget that ride. It sounds like the driver who died today was somebody else, not sure if ol' Kent is still around or what.