DRIVER NERVES

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 13

DRIVER NERVES

Campbell Helped

(N.Z. Press Assn. —Copyright) LAKE EYRE,

May 15.

The Rosal Australian Air Force has sent a pilot indoctrination film to Muloorina station, near Lake Eyre, to help Donald Campbell in his bid for the world landspeed record.

Muloorina station is the headquarters for the Bluebird project. The film is designed to help pilots correct breathing faults which cause them to breathe too quickly when under stress. This makes them take in too much oxygen from the oxygen tanks and they become light-headed and lose their concentration.

A pilot who is by nature anxious or nervous, is more prone to overfast breathing. All the evidence gathered after Campbell’s crash in Bluebird in 1960 at Bonneville, Utah, indicates that Campbell was suffering from too much oxygen caused by breathing too fast. NO CHECK Before the crash Campbell accelerated away from the start at too great a speed. He reached 360 miles an hour in less than two miles. When the wheels of the car hit a slick of crude oil and a cross-wind swung the car across the course, Campbell apparently made no attempt to check the speed or apply the brakes. Doctors have said that these points are consistent with the “let her go and see what happens” attitude of a man suffering from too rapid intake of oxygen into the blood. TWO BARRIERS The light-headedness is similar to the effect of blowing up a balloon quickly. Campbell is a man with two barriers to overcome—the barrier of speed and the barrier of anxiety. For a man who holds the world’s water-speed record and who aims to add the land-speed record, he has none of the laconic phlegmatic characteristics of the heroes of other ventures into the unknown.

Campbell is no dare-devil although he must have his own brand of courage to face a 400-mile-an-hour ride in a four-and-a-half-ton car over the uneven salt surface of Lake Eyre.