The Controlled Impact Demonstration (or colloquially the Crash In the Desert) was a joint project between NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that intentionally crashed a remotely controlled Boeing 720 aircraft to acquire data and test new technologies to aid passenger and crew survival. The crash required more than four years of preparation by NASA Ames Research Center, Langley Research Center, Dryden Flight Research Center, the FAA, and General Electric. After numerous test runs, the plane was crashed on December 1, 1984. The test went generally according to plan, and produced a spectacular fireball that required more than an hour to extinguish. The FAA concluded that about one-quarter of the passengers would have survived, that the antimisting kerosene test fuel did not sufficiently reduce the risk of fire, and that several changes to equipment in the passenger compartment of aircraft were needed. NASA concluded that a head-up display and microwave landing system would have helped the pilot more safely fly the aircraft. Background and experiment setup NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) conducted a joint program for the acquisition, demonstration, and validation of technology for the improvement of transport aircraft occupant crash survivability using a large, four-engine, remotely piloted transport airplane in a controlled impact demonstration (CID). The CID program was conducted at the Dryden Flight Research Facility of NASA Ames Research Center (Ames-Dryden), at Edwards, California, using a remotely controlled Boeing 720 transport, and was completed in late 1984. The objectives of the CID program were to demonstrate a reduction of postcrash fire through the use of antimisting fuel, acquire transport crash structural data, and to demonstrate the effectiveness of existing improved seat-restraint and cabin structural systems. The Boeing 720 (tail number N833NA) was purchased new by the FAA in 1960 as a training aircraft. After more than 20,000 hours and 54,000 takeoff and landing cycles, it had come to the end of its useful life. The aircraft was turned over to NASA-Ames/Dryden Flight Research Center for the CID program in 1981. The additive, ICI's FM-9, a high molecular-weight long chain polymer, when blended with Jet-A fuel, forms antimisting kerosene (AMK). AMK had demonstrated the capability to inhibit ignition and flame propagation of the released fuel in simulated impact tests. AMK cannot be introduced directly into a gas turbine engine due to several possible problems such as clogging of filters. The AMK must be restored to almost