“So he wasn’t a guy falling from a plane, he was a guy hanging from a plane,” Giordano noted. Luckily, Oman was wearing a safety harness. He was hanging from the wheel axle and trying to swing his legs up to dangle upside-down when he slipped and fell. At the Oregon International Airshow in 1991, stuntman Lee Oman had a bad day. Since the 1920s people have gaped at the antics of wing walkers, aerial daredevils who walk or hang from the wings of moving airplanes. He found a Superman action figure for the stuntman and positioned the apparatus in the fluid tank for the re-enactment. First, he watched video footage of the original accident to build a model past experience with remote control planes helped him build the foam-core wing. Giordano returned to the lab from his current job at Boeing to create a scale model of the air show incident. Dye, in this case food coloring, tracks the flow better than the smoke commonly used in wind tunnels.įew people know the UW’s water tunnel better than Joe Giordano, who graduated last year with a master’s degree in aeronautics. But to actually see turbulence it’s more instructive to do the experiment in water. Initially the producers approached the manager of the UW’s wind tunnel. For this episode, they wanted to know how much aerodynamics had hampered a stuntman’s ability to climb back onto an airplane wing once he’d slipped. Afterward, Survive This! calls on experts who can explain what happened during the disaster. “We begin every story with a piece of dramatic video tape that covers a disaster, an accident, a crime, or something of an extremely violent and scary nature, that leaves the viewer wondering how the subject at the center of it all could possibly have come out alive,” said producer Keith Cornell. This unusual experiment was done for an episode of a new television show, Survive This! that looks back on extreme events. The UW’s water tunnel makes fluid dynamics visible, helping to study turbulence. The only thing missing from this dramatic re-enactment is a crowd of 70,000 onlookers, watching the stuntman from hundreds of feet below.īob Breidenthal and Joe Giordano in the Aeronautics & Astronautics Department constructed the scale model for a show airing this week on the Discovery Channel. He swings helplessly as fluid rushes past his body creating tendrils in his wake. In a tank on the south campus, a Superman figure dangles from a plastic airplane wing. Here, it is being used to re-enact an air show mishap for the Discovery Channel

The water tank in the Harris Hydraulics Lab usually performs a supporting role in aeronautics and astronautics research. Recent graduate Joe Giordano adjusts a Superman action figure for an unusual experiment.

Foam core tunnel