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A historical review covering twenty-six years during which there were twenty-four meetings for field demonstrations and presentation of scientific papers. Twenty volumes of Proceedings were produced, consecutively numbered from Fifth to Twenth-Fifth from 1961 through 1981. The First Meeting was at Holloman Air Force Base on 17 May, 1955 in response to a request by Don Blanchard of the Society of Automotive Engineers for a tour of facilities and Field Demonstrations by the Aeromedical Field Laboratory relating to automotive crash research, for the benefit of the newly organized SAE Committee on Motor Vehicle Seat Belts and invited guests. The evolution of the Stapp Car Crash Conferences in terms of organization and program development is traced. Contributions to automotive safety research resulting from the Car Crash Conferences are discussed.

THE problem of crash protection for ground-vehicle occupants relates not only to the general public but involves the Armed Forces inasmuch as there is a tremendous loss of man power to the defense effort from motor vehicle accident injuries. Evidence for the need of safety devices in ground vehicles in order to improve their crash-protection characteristics is recommended. Specifications for lap belts and lap belt installations are described, and the use of these belts in priority vehicles to evaluate their effectiveness is recommended. The three fundamental harness configurations are briefly discussed.

The lap belt has been evaluated as a safety restraint for occupants of automotive vehicles by exposing anthropometric dummies and human volunteers to experimental crash decelerations. Air Force and Civilian automobile crash statistics provided typical configurations of accidents. Instrumented anthropomorphic dummies in salvage vehicles were used to duplicate selected accidents by collision into barriers, other vehicles, or by snubbing the vehicle with a cable going to an anchored hydraulic snubber. Electronically and optically recorded data from these experiments provided configurations for simulating crashes with human volunteers on a catapult powered sled on rails accelerated into a preset water inertia brake; a pendulum swing seat arrested by a snubbing cable; a seat propelled by a shock-cord catapult into mechanical pinch brakes; and finally, the salvage automobile decelerated by the hydraulic snubber.

Jet transport means vastly increased velocities at takeoff, flight, and landing. These velocities build up correspondingly high kinetic energy that increases the hazards of crash landings if not dissipated. But jet safety design standards have changed little from those of the piston engine, even though there are sufficient statistics available for design purposes. In addition, the limits of human tolerance to injury have been determined with sufficient precision to provide minimum standards for safety equipment. If these data were applied to modern aircraft design, many fatalities occurring today could be prevented.

Human criteria for impact tolerance and survival are appropriate for standards in military and aviation space flight, when based on experiments with human volunteers representative of air and space flight crews. Automotive crash also involves pregnant females, infants, small children, the aged and infirm -- for humanitarian reasons excluded from painful and hazardous experiments. The automotive crash repertoire is limited to comparison with the variety and velocity of aerospace impact producing situations. An approach is suggested for standardizing vehicle crashes. On that basis, determining occupant exposure to crash forces then modulating exposure to within human tolerance and survival limits. This will expedite evolution of crash protection.