I was 18 in 1968. A car FREAK from age 4. Had a stock car dirt track a half mile from my house. All my friends were car guys. There were affluent kids we went to school with whose parents bought them big engine corvettes, 396 Camaros, GTO's, Chevelles, Roadrunners, you know. As one should have been able to predict, putting those weapons in the hands of those kids had horrific results in isolated cases.
But we keep doing it over and over again.....

I'm very sorry to hear of this loss. Those who survive these deaths are in my thoughts and prayers. I'm so sorry for the families involved. Please get through this as best you can.

chuck


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"Fox News." Those two words don't go together...

 

As there was a negative difference in height at the end of the runway, I would guess they were just seing a black hole with no obstacle in front of them.The trees are probably below the "horizon" when sitting on the Runway. The best would have been to take some references on the runway markings. It appear, looking on the sat pictures, that starting to brake hard at the Rwy threshold and using the area after that displaced threshold to stop would have been a good start as it looks to be approximatively one third of the Rwy length...But I'm sure we, adults, all know that! But who told them?

 

That diagram of the runway a few pages back is a bit misleading. The subdivision is an airport community and many people there have airplanes and fly. The high area at the end of the runway is a tall pile of dirt built into a crescent shaped blast shield. It protects the road and traffic at the end of the runway from the jet blast when the big jet at the airport runs up.

I do not know how fast they were going before striking the blast shield, but between seeing the obstruction (braking?) and then hitting the hill, they had to have lost a lot of speed before going airborne. And they still went a long ways airborne before the tree and ripping the car in half. It seems to me the math giving a 68 mph take off speed fails to take into account the energy needed to tear this car in half when it meets the tree.

Does really fast count as a guess for how fast they were going?

 

Also, I read on the intitial reports, that the skidmarks are not stratight but rather as if he tried to turn away from the dead end as he was breaking.

If this is correct, this means that the car could have gotten airbone sideways, flipping in mid air and meeting the tree roof first. This could explain the car breaking in half.

It would take less force to break the car in half once the roof has collapsed in and all is left is the floor structure.

Regardless of how the hit the tree, I also believe that the speed of impact had to be way more than the calculated 68mph.

 

Court records: Driver had received four tickets in past two years


STAR-BANNER
OCALA - Joshua Ammirato, the young man who was behind the wheel of a powerful BMW that sailed off the end of the Greystone Airport runway early Saturday and into a tree, had been ticketed four times in less than two years, court records show.

The last ticket that Ammirato, 18, received was on Jan. 23, just a couple of days before he and four other young men died in the fiery crash. The offense: violation of traffic control device.

Ammirato was first ticketed on March 15, 2006, when law officers said he was driving between 20 and 29 mph over the speed limit. He pleaded guilty and paid a $208.50 fine, the records showed.

In June 2006, Ammirato was stopped again. This time he received a ticket for driving between 1 and 9 mph over the speed limit and for driving with a suspended license. He paid a fine and received a driving curfew, the court records showed.

Florida Highway Patrol investigators believe Ammirato's BMW M5 was traveling at a high rate of speed down the airport runway sometime after 3:30 a.m. Saturday when it went off the end and flew some 200 feet into a tree, where it split in two on impact.

Ammirato died, along with Jacon James Casey, 19; James Devon Hime, 19; Dustin J. Dawe, 19; and Isaac Rubin 20.

Stay tuned to ocala.com for more details throughout the day.
__________________

 

Kinda eerie...but I was just reading this post on the M5 Board (http://www.m5board.com/vbulletin/sho...d.php?t=111454) where people were skeptical about him being a 18 year old and wise/responsible enough to be driving/own a 500hp car. Many warned him and cared for his well-being. The comment of one member was pretty eerily foreshadowing...

"My only bit of advice matey - If you crash in a big way expect to be on the news."

Here's an article about him consulting the M5 board hours before the accident...

http://www.ocala.com/article/2008012...rtwithcomments

 

If the runway is flat until the end and the car only moves at speed horizontally, then the only vertical component to the car's path will be due to gravity (9.8 m/s^2). It is simple math to calculate the amount of time an object drops 65 feet (the delta between the distance to the ground minus the height at which it struck the tree).

I can't vouch that the data the report provided is accurate, but given that data, 68 mph is the right number. The math is good, but what the real distances are is another matter.

 

But he could have been going sideways at 68 mph, after having skidded-out from braking at high speed.

 

Such sad, sad story - a clear case of having more money (the kid's parents) than brains.

A clear case of Darwin at work ...

 

What's even worse is some guy on the M5 board posted this thread :

*******

http://www.m5board.com/vbulletin/sho...d.php?t=110841

I am in the beginning planning stage w/ another member to investigate what airstrips are available in So. FL. to do 30 to 150 mph run offs just like Gustav did on the airfield.
This will be a great opportunity to run our cars w/o getting in trouble.

I need to get a feel of who would be interested to make this happen. It would be open to other sports cars to get more people to compete.

There is an 11,000 ft. runway in consideration. That's more than enough to go 190 or 200 mph and slow down.

My goal would be to have these events every 3 months depending on the interest, but who wouldn't want to run their car ***** out.

Please respond if you're interested.

Thank you all,
M5Ranger...Juan

********

And on the last day of his life, the kid (AmericanM5) posted "I'm in."

Wonder where he got the idea to put the car on a private airstrip that night?

 

Wow!

 

They were obviously travelling in excess of 100 mph when the car left the ground.

 

How did you arrive at that at that number? You may be right, but I didn't see the obvious, I guess.

 

I think that there was evidence cited that the car was tracking sideways (skid marks), so you are probably right.

Regardless of which orientation that car had when it left the runway, if the final velocity really was 68 mph, the trajectory would be about the same. What a horrible fate.