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Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

photo of car after a rollover accident

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, April 22, 2013 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Byron Bloch

"Automobile Safety: What You Don't Know Can Kill You"

ABSTRACT -- Byron will show and tell many of the life-or-death secrets he's uncovered from his hands-on inspection of accident vehicles coast-to-coast for over 40 years. You'll learn about "crashworthiness" and whether your own vehicle may be compromised in ways that can be fatal, with actual case examples and crash tests. He'll discuss rollover roof crush, fuel tank fires, side impact intrusion, occupant ejection, and truck underride. Just how safe or unsafe is the vehicle that your family and you depend on, and how do you know? Learn secrets that neither the automakers nor NHTSA reveal to you. His website is: www.AutoSafetyExpert.com

The talk will also include a brief fictional look at safety in space. When Byron was a technical consultant for the TV series The Bold Ones: The New Doctors, he wrote the script for an episode about a medical emergency on a fictional Apollo mission. We'll see a brief excerpt from that episode, which aired in 1969, before the Apollo 13 mission.

SPEAKER -- Byron Bloch has been a national court-qualified auto safety expert for over 40 years, analyzing accident vehicles to determine whether there's an unsafe, defective design. Building on his training in industrial design and human factors engineering, he studies crash tests, dissects exemplar vehicles, and shows safer designs that make a vehicle more "crashworthy". He also brings safety issues to the public, and presented his own Auto Safety Reports twice-a-week on ABC TV News in Los Angeles for 7 years, plus national newsmagazine shows (two of which won Emmys). He has testified at Congressional Hearings, received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2001 World Traffic Safety Symposium in New York.

Growing up in Chicago, he built and launched model rockets and was a young member of the American Rocket Society.


Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov