Please, do not try what you're about to see at home.
We're what you call experts.
Can't you tell?
On this breakneck episode of "Mythbusters"...
Adam and Jamie are bubbling over with excitement...
That was magnificent.
as they test this viral video.
Yeah! We did it.
But can a bubble-packed wrap...
Science is dangerous!
really let you walk away from a 35-foot fall?
Still totally and utterly dead.
Then Kari, Grant, and Tory go head over heels...
for some Bond-car bedlam.
Look, James, I got a lot of stuff going on right now.
Can a rocket-powered ejector seat...
This is the most dangerous thing I have ever built.
really flip an overturned car back onto its wheels?
Who are the mythbusters?
Adam Savage...
This is science in action.
And Jamie Hyneman.
Bye-bye.
Between them, more than 30 years of special-effects experience.
Together with Grant Imahara...
That is crazy!
Kari Byron...
and Tory Belleci.
It's about to get real.
They don't just tell the myths.
They put them to the test.
So, judging by the fact that we've got
this bubble stuff all over the place,
can I assume that somebody's done something
really stupid with it?
You are absolutely correct.
What we've got is a viral video where a guy wraps himself up
in a bunch of this bubble packaging,
hurls himself off a three-story building,
and at the end of his fall, appears to be totally unharmed.
Well, it is designed to cushion things.
Take a wild guess.
But can a few inches of the pimply padding
break a 35-foot fall?
In other words,
can this three-story story really be real?
Yeah, we did it!
Obviously, at some point,
one of us is gonna end up wrapped in bubble packaging
and jumping off a building.
But I have some safety concerns about that.
How do you want to deal with it?
I think, quite simply,
by starting our testing with buster instead of with us.
Let's replicate the exact circumstances we see in the video --
wrapping buster in the same amount of bubble packaging,
throw him off a correctly sized building,
put some accelerometers on his body, and see if he lives.
Works for me.
So, to recreate the circumstances of this bubble-boy myth,
Adam, Jamie, and buster
drop in on their favorite drop zone.
Today, we find ourselves
in a decommissioned military building on San Francisco bay,
and it's not our first time here.
For instance, way back when,
we did "Awning Fall" Right below me.
Today, it is all bubble boy.
In the clip, the guy falls from 35 feet,
he lands flat on his back,
and he's got four inches of bubble packing on him.
Now, for us to tell
how effective that bubble packing would be,
we need to do a control,
which means that we're gonna drop our dummy first
from that height without any bubble packing
and see what he registers on our sensors.
So, buster's facing two three-story tumbles.
First, he'll nosedive naked,
then he'll take the plunge in a bubbly burrito.
Now, how are we gonna compare one to the other?
With this.
This is an accelerometer,
and it can read g-loads up to 5,000G's.
This ought to give us a really nice, clean comparison
between buster dropping protected and unprotected.
That's the plan,
so Adam cuts to the chest and sets the sensors...
Think you're ready, buster.
before buster is hoisted 35 feet...
That looks kind of perfect.
and assumes the position.
- Poor buster. - Poor, poor buster.
Here we go.
Buster, control, dropping from 35 feet!
In 3, 2, 1.
Nice.
A perfect hit.
He stayed together in one piece.
He totally did.
Yep, if there's one thing buster can do...
it's stick a landing.
A perfect hit.
Buster's control drop went off without a hitch.
Feels like old times.
He hit the target from 35 feet, he landed, he flipped over.
Now we've got to see
how many g's he pulled when he hit.
What did we get?
Well, buster falling flat onto the ground with no protection,
the accelerometer says that he took 300 g's.
- Lethal. - Absolutely lethal.
Like four times your average severe car accident kind of lethal.
Adam's not exaggerating.
With no protection, buster's drop was a disaster,
And he smacked the sidewalk at 300g's.
With all this talk about g's and g-loads,
You may be wondering what a "g" is.
Well, a "g" is one earth's gravity.
So, when we say that buster's experiencing 300 g's,
that means he's experiencing a stress
300 times as large as the earth's gravity,
and that's a lot.
It sure is.
A 300-g impact is like being slammed
by a speeding cement truck.
But will that be the same when bound in bubbles?
To match the viral video,
buster is carefully cocooned in bubble pack...
Hold on a second. I'm getting dizzy.
Me, too.
until the protective packing is four inches thick.
So, it's pretty obvious that if we start to add padding,
we're going to be reducing the impact
by slowing down the deceleration process
that meeting of buster and the pavement.
The question is, is four inches of padding enough
to reduce that deceleration to where buster would survive?
I don't think so.
With buster easy prey,
buried up to his neck in bubbles,
it's time for him to make his 35-foot leap of faith.
All right.
Buster falling from 35 feet in bubble packaging.
3... come on, buster. 2, 1.
Go.
That was a satisfying thud.
I don't think it was a survivable thud,
but it was satisfying.
Buster bounced,
but did he burst his own bubble?
With all of this extra padding,
we dropped buster's maximum g-load from 300 g's to 260 g's.
He's still totally and utterly dead.
Yeah, he's gonna need a lot more padding than this
to survive that fall.
Indeed, he is.
While four inches of bubbles did reduce buster's g-load,
he's still three and a half times over the lethal limit.
So, buster's dead falling naked,
and dead falling wrapped in bubble pack,
where does that leave us?
Well, I can't help but think that with enough of this stuff,
sooner or later, you'd be safe.
I totally agree.
Let's head back to the shop and see
how much it would take for him to survive this fall.
More bubble trouble. I like it.
Next up, it's time to be shaken and stirred.
All right, so we have a myth that involves
ejector seats, missiles, and James Bond.
Sounds like the perfect combination to me.
Yeah, it's from the movie
where he has a car chase right across a frozen lake.
Something goes horribly wrong,
and boom, car's upside down.
Right, and that gives the bad guy time to pull over,
line up his car, and fire his on-board car missiles.
Just as you think James Bond is a sitting duck,
at the last minute,
he pushes the passenger ejector seat,
and poof, shoots the seat through the roof.
Oh, and that amount of force imparted on the ground
causes the car to flip back over, and he drives away.
This could be the best James Bond myth we've ever tested.
Upside down with nowhere to go,
007 seems down for the count,
but by deploying his rocket-powered passenger hot seat,
he flips his way to freedom.
But is this rocketry real,
or is this myth on thin ice?
Okay, so, all we need is an upside-down sports car
and a rocket-powered ejector seat.
Well, see, the ejector seat could be a problem.
Since we don't know exactly what Q's design involved,
it could be some high-powered thing
that launches people hundreds of feet in the air.
Or it could be a low-key ejector seat,
you know, enough to send the bad guy out of the car.
Well, if you look at the footage, when it deploys,
you see just a little bit of flame.
Now, with a big ejector seat,
you'd imagine you'd see this huge fireball after it,
and that's not what we see,
so I'm guessing probably the latter.
Something that ejected, like, 25 feet?
Yeah.
And then we find out what that rocket thrust is.
- We flip the car and test the myth. - Great.
So, first up,
the mythbusters need a top-of-the-range Bond-mobile.
I don't know about you, but I feel like a spy.
But they got this.
Yes, Mr. President, we'll be right there.
After doing a little bit of research,
even to find a used and trashed car
like the one in the Bond film,
we were talking about $100,000.
This one's a little more in our price range,
and we chose this car because it has a similar curb weight.
It's 4,000 pounds,
and we can actually create the same weight distribution,
front to back.
This one should work really well for our flip.
It may not look like much,
but with similar specs to Bond's movie machine,
this car's the "wheel" deal.
So, cue the ejection injection.
So, to test this myth properly,
we have to make some modifications to our vehicle.
One, we're pulling out the pre-existing passenger seat.
Then we are cutting open the sunroof bigger
so that it allows a chair with a person sitting in it to be ejected.
That was easy.
And then, finally,
we're introducing our own rocket-powered ejector seat.
This is gonna be awesome.
Tory soon "bonds" a rocket guide rail into place,
before he then heaves in some heavy metal.
We're adding a big steel plate to the floor of the car
for a couple of reasons.
It fits perfectly!
We don't want the rocket to burn through the bottom of the car,
we want to contain all of the thrust,
and is will give us a weight distribution
that's balanced just like the car from the movie clip.
And once that reinforced floor is safely locked and loaded,
their spy-car special is almost all set.
So, our ejector seat is finished.
Now, there's wheels on the back of the chair that hook into a rail.
That way, he stays on line
as the rockets thrust him upwards and out of the car.
Now all we have to do is attach the rocket to it,
see if it actually works.
If it works, then we're gonna flip the car over,
and see if the ejector seat will actually
flip the car back on its wheels.
Adios, muchachos.
That's the theory,
and a "Goldfinger" paint job later...
Just paint right over the bird poop.
Look at that. What bird poop?
and it's time for this myth to live and let die.
All right, test.
Coming right up,
will their ejector seat fire or fizzle?
And Adam gets in some serious bubble trouble.
Bye-bye, everybody.
In this viral video, supposedly,
a wrapping of bubble pack let's you dive and survive.
But buster's landing was anything but soft.
That was a satisfying thud.
Well, buster's dead again.
Yep, and I have to say
I'm really glad it was him and not me.
Yeah, well, speaking of that,
before one of us gets wrapped in this stuff
and jumps off a building,
I think we've got a bunch of testing we need to do first
to determine how much it takes to be safe.
So, some small-scale testing is what you're thinking?
Exactly.
All right, let's get down to the shop and set it up.
Yep, before either mythbuster
takes a tumble as a crash-test dummy...
Oh! Hey! Oh, no!
the guys first plan some bench tests
to find out what can make a bubble pack leap of faith safe.
But what equals safe?
For that, I want you to cast your mind
back to our episode called "Dumpster diving,"
which Jamie and I were trained to jump off a building
by a hollywood stunt man.
Perfect.
Now, the g-forces we encountered were about 10 g's.
That is the g-load that hollywood stunt men use
to keep themselves safe.
That is what our target g-load is.
But to reach that 10-g target,
they need the top of the pops.
Wow, feel this stuff.
So, first up, the guys are going to see
which style of bubble pack --
mini, medium, or heavy-duty,
has the best cushion credentials.
So many bubbles, so little time.
And how, by dropping a human analogue
that brings a whole new meaning to the word "Simple".
Believe it or not,
this thing right here is my idealized human.
It's a plastic tube filled with seven cannonballs,
and it doesn't talk.
Cause this test ain't about chitchat.
it's about getting a consistent drop.
The idea here is to have something
that is the approximate size and weight of a human,
but has a uniform shape
so that we can reliably test the performance of
various types of bubble packing.
It's ready.
And they'll start at the mythical four inches,
and double the thickness from there.
As we increase the amount of padding we're using,
we're looking to see if we can find any kind of pattern --
in other words, if we double the thickness of the padding,
are we cutting the impact we see in half?
To find out, the guys attach impact accelerometers
before raising the human analogue
to a benchmark 6 feet high.
I know what you're thinking.
You're wondering why we are dropping a solid body
onto bubble packaging,
rather than wrapping it in bubble packaging,
like the guy does in the clip.
The fact is, from a physics standpoint,
when you're examining the cushioning effects
of bubble packaging,
it doesn't make any difference
whether you wrap it or you drop it.
So, they line up the mini, medium, and heavyweight bubbles,
and it's bomb's away on all three.
Dropping human analogue into bubble packaging.
3, 2, 1.
200 pounds is dropped from 6 feet...
into three types of bubbles...
- I felt that one. - Yeah.
four inches thick.
It's a free fall free-for-all.
That was very, very different.
It was.
But when the dust settles...
Let's check out the horror show of this drop.
the g-loads are ready to be revealed.
Coming in beautifully.
The medium bubbles faired worst, producing 100 g's,
but strangely, the mini and heavyweight bubbles
were almost neck and neck.
That's amazing.
I would have never called
that this would have that result on the bubble pack.
But how will these 4-inch results
stack up against 8 inches?
Now we're doing the same set of tests again,
except this time with double the thickness
of bubble packaging material.
We expect that we'll get better results.
The question we have is how much better?
Hold on tight. It's time to release the pounds.
8 inches thick. Here we go.
3, 2, 1.
8 inches of wrap has the human analogue making a break for it.
The question is,
will the rebounds pop out different g-loads?
That is really scary as hell.
This time, the mini bubble had the least trouble with 35 g's,
while medium and heavyweight are both on 40.
But what's crucial is
that doubling the bubbles has cut the g-load in half.
That was very interesting.
8 inches, very different than 4 inches.
Yeah.
I've always said it.
But will that pattern continue at 16 inches?
3, 2, 1.
Science is dangerous!
Double the bubbles has cut the g-loads in half again,
and that's not the only good news.
Here, at 16 inches,
these three measurements are effectively the same.
That means that the more bubble wrap
we wrap around buster and ourselves,
the less important the type of bubble wrap.
I would not have called that.
Yep, it's been a successful small-scale test,
because it seems that with a thick enough bubble burrito,
our mythbuster may survive the dive.
But their shop drops were short.
Will things still be looking up when they raise the stakes?
That was magnificent.
Kari, Grant, and Tory are bonding
as they find out if you can flip a car
thanks to a rocket-powered ejector seat.
And at an abandoned air field,
first up is some ejector evaluation.
Time to deploy our spy car.
Mythbusters, it's go time.
We've come out to the New Jerusalem runway
so we can test our Bond ejector-seat myth.
Now, for that, we've built an ejector seat,
and we're gonna find out how much thrust it takes
to get our passenger out of the car.
Now, this is important, because that's how much thrust we're going to use
to try to flip the car.
Yep, before any car flips out...
the guys first need to give their ejector seat
the same thrust as a 007 model --
with some top-of-the-range rockets.
Now, the target height that we're looking for
is 20 to 25 feet,
but you can't get that
with any off-the-shelf hobby rocket motor,
and that's why we're using these.
These have a 500-millisecond burn time,
200 pounds of thrust each.
Four of thm should be more than enough
to get our 300 pounds of buster, plus his rig,
up and out of the car.
So, Tory adds the rockets to the seat...
All right, the chair is loaded.
and the seat, complete with Bond villain to the car.
We're in!
All right, this is rocket-powered ejector seat.
Test.
3, 2, 1, fire.
That's great!
That is perfect!
Perfect is right.
As their ejector seat propelled buster
right into their benchmark butter zone.
But once the smoke's cleared,
it's clear that this test isn't just about good news.
Now, I'm not a super spy,
but I think I've identified a major problem
with the ejector-seat concept,
and that is filling the entire car with flame.
Now, that was just the bare minimum of rocket power
that we needed to get buster out of the car.
So the bad guy, he'd be out of the car,
but your good guy, he'd be toast, literally.
Yeah. The test does highlight
the flaw of using rockets in enclosed spaces,
but what's more important
is that it's mission accomplished.
We achieved everything we wanted with this test.
We have enough thrust to get buster out of the car,
we got simultaneous emission,
and we got the 20 feet, even 30 feet,
That we were looking for.
Now, it's the fun part.
We'll see if this actually has enough to flip the car.
In other words,
it's time for this myth to get turned on its head.
Just to recap,
we are testing the myth from the "James Bond" Movie,
where if a car's upside down, and you use the ejector seat,
you can flip that car back on its wheels.
So far, we successfully made an ejector seat
by using four rockets.
That gave us enough thrust to get a man out of the car.
But now, is that thrust gonna be enough
to flip a car back on its wheels?
To find out just that,
Tory carefully installs four identical rockets
before an even more delicate operation must take place --
inverting their Bond-mobile.
All right.
It's a flippin' unusual method for flopping a car.
But through a combination of tug-of-war...
Backing up. Lowering.
machine muscle...
and Tory holding the blue rope,
the guys slowly inch the car into position...
This is very exciting.
until finally, we have touchdown.
Perfect.
So, Q built a rocket-powered ejector seat
for James Bond's car, and so did we.
The only problem is that it only takes 800 pounds of thrust
to get a guy out of a car.
That is a 4,000 pound car.
800 pounds of thrust --
I'm sorry, but it's not gonna flip the car.
In fact, I barely think it's even gonna move it.
Grant is firmly in the "Dr. No" camp,
but you can "Never say never."
All right. This is ejector-seat car flip.
Here we go in 3, 2, 1.
Fire.
That was a little underwhelming.
Yeah. It looks like four just isn't enough.
Ain't that the truth?
Instead of flipping to freedom, the car barely quivered.
Now, so far, we've re-created the circumstances of the myth,
and the results are not promising.
Four rockets was enough to get a person out of the car,
but not enough to move the car at all.
Indeed, the math of the myth just doesn't add up.
800 pounds can propel a passenger,
but it's never going to flip a car.
But all is not lost.
We want to give this myth the best possible chance,
so we're actually going to step it up.
We're going to make our ejector seat
an equivalent to a fighter-jet ejector seat.
Now we're talking about 4,000 pounds of thrust.
I mean, it's a little bit of overkill,
but Q might have gone there.
Their first ejector seat
replicated the flimsy flame of the film,
and it didn't pack enough punch.
But this time...
Whoo-hoo, look at all these rockets.
It's like the 4th of July.
all bets are off
as the mythbusters fire this myth to the max.
But will it be the shot in the arm this test needs?
The whole concept here
is that the ejector seat is firing down into the ground,
therefore pushing the car over, back onto its wheels.
But I just have a hard time believing
this Hollywood myth is true.
What I think is gonna happen
is this car is just gonna go up into a big ball of fire.
Well, in that case,
it's a good job that the fire department has arrived.
Okay, this is Bond ejector seat,
20 rockets, 4,000 pounds of thrust.
Take it away.
All right, let's see if the ejector seat flips the car.
Here we go, in 3, 2, 1, fire.
It lifted it a little bit, but it didn't flip it.
That was sweet!
Let's go see the carnage.
Well, we should probably get that fire put out.
With the fire brought under control,
the guys go in for a closer look,
Not that it's really necessary.
So, this myth is busted.
No matter what we did, we could not get this car to flip
with the rocket ejector seat.
And that was at a ridiculous amount of thrust.
However, we are not gonna stop here.
This is the part of the show where we replicate the results,
and we're gonna find out how much thrust it would take
to get this car to flip.
We're gonna do it old-school, Hollywood style.
Strap yourself in,
because this myth's about to flip its lid.
Next...
This is the most dangerous thing I have ever built.
And still to come, Adam faces a 35-foot free-fall finale.
I'm a little bit scared.
Please, don't' try anything you are about to see at home.
We're what you call experts.
According to YouTube, a 4-inch bubble burrito
will mean you don't drop dead from a 35-foot drop.
Go!
But according to the mythbusters,
you most definitely will.
Still totally and utterly dead, though.
Yet all is not lost.
The readings we've been getting thus far in the shop are good.
They give us a direction,
but they're nowhere near our butter zone of 10 g's.
So, now buster here is our new human analogue.
He's floppier, he's more accurate,
and he's gonna get dropped from the highest point in our shop.
15 feet is more than double the height of their bench tests,
but still less than half the height of the myth.
So, will buster's impact on a 16-inch bed of bubbles
approach the 10 g-load that this myth needs?
Buster, dropping 15 feet into 16 inches of bubble packaging.
3, 2, 1, go.
- That was magnificent. - Wasn't it?
Buster bounced dead center, but is his impact in the zone?
So, buster's fall into the bubble packaging
from 15 feet was perfect.
But he pulled 39 g's upon impact.
We're looking for a butter zone of 10 g's.
39 is totally out, so next up,
we're gonna double the thickness and drop him again.
39 is four times their safety target, so once more,
they double the bubbles to 32 inches thick.
It's starting to get kind of impractical, isn't it?
Yeah, it is. Here we go.
Buster, dropping 15 feet into 32 inches of bubble material.
3, 2, 1.
Poor buster.
Once again, buster bounces,
but is he walking away?
I would feel like if we were gonna see a reduced g-load,
that he would take longer to bounce back up.
It's not the result they were after.
Doubling the bubbles reduced the load by less than a quarter,
and that doesn't bode well.
Because if 16 inches resulted in 39 g's,
and 32 inches in 30,
they'd need a pile of packing 15 feet high to get to 10 g's,
and that's just for a 15-foot drop.
From 35 feet, they'd need well over 50 feet of wrap,
giving buster a 100-foot diameter.
So, if layering up the bubble pack isn't working,
is there a design that will?
For a full 60 minutes,
the guys stop, drop, and roll out ideas...
What about something like this?
but get nowhere fast.
That doesn't seem to give any improvement.
But then they pop out a plan in parallel.
What if we didn't wrap it in tight tubes,
but we wrap it in tubes with a bigger hole in the middle?
So, these would crush just like a coil spring in a mattress.
Right. Exactly.
It may not look like much, but by alternating regular sheets
with coiled but hollow bubble springs,
the guys have high hopes.
- Awesome. - All right.
And once two bubble-spring mattresses are complete,
buster's ready to take another for the team.
Here we go.
Buster onto modified bubble-packaging geometry.
In 3, 2, 1.
With no buster bounce, there's a clear difference.
Oh, my god, that's, like, one of the best drops ever.
Once he enters the bed, you never see him again.
But from 15 feet, buster still took 30 g's,
three times their 10-g target.
So, they add one more mattress.
In 3, 2, 1.
But is this the soft landing they're looking for?
So, our 15-foot buster drops here in the shop
are yielding some exciting data fruit,
and I just coined that term.
Check out the first drop here.
We are dropping buster into two layers of tubes,
constructed of thick-wall, heavy-back,
half-inch bubble packaging,
and he pulled an average of 30 g's on that drop.
That's an improvement over some of the other stuff we've seen,
but it's still not in our ballpark.
However, for the second drop, which you can see here,
we added a layer of thin-wall, non-heavy-duty,
half-inch bubble packaging
to slow down his deceleration,
and it seems to have done exactly that.
On that second drop, he pulled an average of 15 g's.
We cut our g-load in half.
And to bring the 10-g target into range,
Jamie's tweaking the tubes into a more shock-absorbing shape.
That cone, or funnel shape,
will allow the bubbles to
neatly fold inside the structure, like so,
and give us a nice, linear deceleration.
And these bubble cones serve a double purpose.
We can make a curved instead of a flat sheet,
and we can actually roll Adam up inside it.
Uh, yep. You heard that right.
And we can actually roll Adam up inside it.
So confident are they in their new mattress model
that for the next drop, it's out with buster,
and in with someone altogether more important.
Now the question is, is this engineering of bubble packaging
enough to save my life.
That's what we're doing next.
All right.
I hate to admit it, but this Bond myth is busted.
Yep. We got the car to bounce up,
but it didn't flip over.
Plus, we burned up Bond in the process.
So, that means...
it's time to replicate the results.
Yep. There is one technique
that Hollywood uses when they want to flip a car.
That's right -- nitrogen cannon pointed straight down
should provide enough force
to flip the car all the way back over.
Nitrogen cannon it is.
Originally built for the "Superhero Special"...
the nitrogen cannon sure packs a punch.
But for this myth, the gloves are coming off.
You see this barrel? This ain't a barrel.
That's a barrel.
By beefing up both the diameter of the barrel...
and the size of the tank,
Grant's cranking the cannon's power to the max.
And in theory, this mighty machine should be able
to flip this myth on its head.
It fits!
But what about in practice?
We're back at the New Jerusalem runway.
Now, we've already busted our Bond myth
that an ejector seat's gonna be able
to flip a car from upside down to right-side up,
so now we're gonna get a little Hollywood on it.
We've got a nitrogen cannon loaded in the passenger seat.
Hopefully, this is actually going to
flip our car completely over,
so we can see this Bond myth in action.
But before firing it up,
first comes the obligatory inversion.
Okay, so, just to be clear,
here's how things are going to work.
Hang on one sec.
Inside the barrel of the cannon
is a solid steel rod that's about 3 feet long.
Yeah, hold it right there.
When the car's in position,
Grant's going to weld the bracket from the rod
onto the trench plate so it doesn't fly out.
Then we'll fill the tank to maximum pressure,
and the idea that when we trigger it...
3, 2, 1.
the rod will get fired into the ground with such power
that the car should twist up and over,
landing on its wheels.
Indeed,
but it's not just the tank that's feeling the pressure.
Well, is this orders of magnitude
more dangerous than what we normally do?
Look, I'm a little nervous, all right?
The cannon could rupture, and the valve could have a leak.
It could accidentally go off while I'm filling up.
Luckily for all of us, Grant mans up, fills up...
Okay. Good to go.
and finally...
All right, you guys ready?
Yeah, let's flip the car.
All right.
Ejector seat, car flip with the nitrogen cannon.
In 3, 2, 1.
In bubble boy,
Adam and Jamie finally think they've cracked it.
That looks pretty good.
So, back at the drop zone,
it's time to crank the danger dial up to the max --
well, almost.
Well, our hard work and our testing
have paid off,
and it now seems like it is time for me
to wrap myself in bubble packaging
and get thrown off a building.
I'm not going to the full 35 feet just yet.
No, the first drop I'm gonna do
is to replicate buster's 15-foot fall.
Am I scared?
I have to admit, I'm a little bit scared.
Scared because their best impact has been 15 g's,
a full 5 g's above the safety threshold.
Hopefully, tapering their tubes
will ensure Adam can make the leap and live to tell the tale.
We're counting on the fact that the bubble packaging here
is going to save my life,
but we've also posited some other worst-case scenarios
and implemented safety procedures
to protect me in their case.
First of all, a neck brace,
a helmet, and a spine protector.
I'll have a radio ear piece in
so I can communicate to the outside.
This ought to keep me safe.
"Ought" being the operative word,
because remember,
the cone-coil springs are an untested technology.
You ready?
I'm ready. Let's do it.
Here we go. See you on the other side.
That's right, because from this point,
Adam's under wraps...
Oh, that's cozy.
starting with five layers of heavyweight bubble pack.
Bye-bye, everybody.
Then the first coat of their spring system
is coiled around him...
Okay, up we go. Keep tension.
It's a good thing I don't get claustrophobic.
Followed by the second.
Pull a little tension, and up and in.
You're doing good.
But once that's taped on, Adam drops a bombshell.
- Hey, Jamie. - Yeah?
I tell you, I can feel the pressure.
It's quite a lot of weight.
The weight on me is actually quite intense.
100 pounds of bubble-packed mattress
has Adam under pressure,
and there's still a layer to go.
Is it a problem?
No, it's not more than I can take,
but I can tell you that when we put that third layer on,
that's about as much as a human could take.
It's a worrying revelation.
Here comes the third layer.
And at the full 150 pounds,
the weight of the wrapping will be almost unbearable.
It's gonna be heavy.
So the guys really need to bubble along...
Okay. Now I've got to get the big tape.
Are you guys okay?
And get the final mattress mobilized.
Are you all right?
Yeah, I'm all right. Am I fully wrapped now?
- You are. - Oh, great.
I truly am a bubble boy.
With Adam trussed up like a turkey on steroids,
the team carefully cradles him to the drop zone
before Jamie gets ready to raise the bar.
So, we're going up. Are you ready?
Almost.
Are my feet off the end of this thing?
No, they're not.
Then I think I'm ready, Jamie.
Okay. Up we go.
But as they start to rise...
Oh, bounce, bounce, bounce.
The test strikes turbulence.
I can feel myself being blown around in the wind.
Out of nowhere, the wind has picked up,
and that's got Jamie very worried, indeed.
You guys are gonna go that way,
and I need the four guys on the four tile lines.
You keep track of Adam. Make sure he's okay.
With Adam in a squeeze...
This is like, I can feel pressure over my whole body.
They dare not delay this free-fall finale.
I'm on the trip line.
Adam, we're in place.
You're at the correct height.
Are you good to go?
Jamie, I am good to go.
But just as they're ready to rumble...
Is there anybody that's not good to go?
Okay, we're going in 3, 2 --
Hold on. There's too much wind.
The wind cranks up so much that it's too dangerous to continue.
Uh, okay.
But it's also dangerous to stand down,
because 15 feet up, Adam's being smothered.
All in all, the mythbusters are in a bubble of trouble.
The Bond ejector flip...
Have a good flight, buddy.
Fire.
didn't lift once...
That was pathetic.
Let alone twice,
which means the team has a "License to kill" off this myth,
courtesy of their nitrogen cannon.
- Ready to do this? - Oh, yeah.
Let's flip the car, Hollywood style.
All right, here we go.
This is ejector-seat car flip with nitrogen cannon.
In 3, 2, 1.
Good job, Q.
That was awesome. And that's how it's done.
At last, they've got air,
and "for your eyes only", here's the high-speed.
The nitrogen cannon fired its steel rod
with enough force to flip the car a full 180 degrees
before the whole thing falls gently back to earth,
right-side up.
The Bond myth is busted,
but the flip was worth the trip.
And that is how you flip a car.
I can't believe it worked!
But it worked, and that's what counts.
Right. All you need is a giant nitrogen cannon.
Let's go get some martinis, shaken, not stirred.
Careful about tipping me.
It's the grand finale of "Bubble boy,"
And Adam's life hangs in the balance.
Okay, up we go.
I have taken some falls on this show before.
I've jumped off buildings.
I've slipped on banana peels.
I've flown 70 feet through the air
at the end of a giant water slide.
But this fall is different,
because I am completely passive to this entire enterprise.
My life is in Jamie's hands.
Well, Jamie's and Mother Nature's.
I can feel myself being blown around in the wind.
With the wind gusting, they've stopped the drop,
leaving Adam precariously poised.
You guys are gonna go that way,
and I need the four guys on the four tile lines.
You keep track of Adam. Make sure he's okay.
Luckily for everyone, it's not long before the wind falls.
Okay.
Is there anybody that's not good to go?
So, it's now or never.
Okay, we're going in 3, 2, 1.
There's no doubt about it.
The padded pod plummeted.
But how's the cargo?
That silence rings alarm bells.
The team rushes in,
and Jamie is the first to the scene, when...
Oh, I'm okay!
I'm okay.
After a free fall of 15 feet...
it looks like Adam and Jamie's bubble engineering
has taken the bulk of the blow.
That was intense.
But the touchdown didn't please the pilot.
What happened was the moment you released me,
my head came off the board,
and then, an instant later, it hit the board.
But that rough landing wasn't the worst part.
Ohh, I have to tell you, man,
the weight of all this bubble wrap
was the hardest part of that.
It felt like two guys sitting on my chest.
Well, that's something buster couldn't tell us, huh?
It's absolutely what I call an empirical test.
Thank you, sir.
It's done!
While it came close to crushing him,
their bubble barrel did protect the plummet,
peaking at just 9 g's,
but remember, in the clip,
bubble boy jumped from 35 feet.
Yeah, but you know what?
I don't think I'd trust something like this at 35 feet.
I don't want to go at 35 feet.
If I went at 35 feet, I would need more padding,
and more padding, I couldn't take it.
I think that's the limit of human experimentation.
It just makes me nervous anyway.
You and me both.
So, buster's going to pick up the pieces
and wrap this myth for the final 35-foot fall.
He will have around him the same amount of padding I had at 15 feet,
and here is why.
With all the weight of that bubble packaging around me,
it was about as much as my body could take.
That tells me that this is
the most amount of bubble packaging
one could have around their body
for a jump off of a building.
That further tells me
that if buster does not survive
in this amount of padding,
the entire idea of jumping off a building
and being protected by bubble packaging is totally busted.
With old friend David Harding
ready to crunch their drop data,
their package is postmarked 35 feet, ready for delivery.
All right, here we go.
Buster, from the full 35 feet in 3, 2, 1.
That was perfect.
I think that was perfect.
The falling was perfect.
The landing, not so much.
So glad that was not me.
But how did buster fare?
Well, for that, it's over to David, the data doctor.
All right, David.
I'm dying to find out
how buster did from 35 feet.
What do the numbers say?
All right, the torso peaked right around 29 g's.
The head was quite a bit higher.
You can see it's about 48 g's.
48 g's?
That would hurt.
Dude, and that is barely survivable,
but you'd be tuggin' funny for the rest of your life.
Yeah. That's quite a hit.
I am so glad that I did not try this one.
Yep, although Adam and Jamie's mattress mechanism
offered way more protection than the bubble-boy burrito,
this three-story story is nothing but busted.
So, how are we gonna call it?
I think it's pretty clear.
We've tested it every way from Sunday.
There is no reasonable amount of bubble packaging
that will allow you to safely leap off
a three and a half story building.
And if this is busted, and the whole idea is busted.
Yep, I agree, it's busted.
Let's get out of here.