Planes used to get crash tests, too. Here's what they looked like

The Federal Aviation Administration set up an obstacle course to crash planes through at Deer Valley Airport in Phoenix, Arizona in the 1960s. Researchers wanted to simulate as many types of impacts as possible in a single crash.

As in earlier research, the FAA strongly believed that fire was a significant factor in plane crashes it could work to mitigate. The test manager believed that 80 to 90 percent of passengers would have survived the Lockheed Constellation’s crash run if there was no fire, the New York Times reported.

NASA partnered with the FAA in 1984 to organize the Controlled Impact Demonstration. The test featured a remote-controlled Boeing 720 flown into steel structures installed in the Rogers Dry Lake at Edwards Air Force Base. It took four years of preparations to create crash parameters that the FAA considered survivable.

Sandia National Laboratories decided to strap five rockets to an F-4 Phantom fighter jet and sling it at a concrete wall just four years later. The lab wanted to measure the impact force. The jet hit the target at 480 miles per hour.

NASA’s Landing and Impact Research Facility was originally established for Apollo program testing in the 1960s. The site features a massive gantry key used to drop aircraft from as high as 200 feet. The same facility was used to test the Orion spacecraft that the Artemis program will use to return to the Moon.

Discovery operated its own full-scale crash test in 2012 using a former Singapore Airlines Boeing 727. The made-for-tv experiment was conducted on the massive dry lake bed of Laguna Salada in Mexico.

The Landing and Impact Research Facility is used to crash a wide variety of aircraft. While the full-scale drop tests might not be a dramatic as smashing a plane into a lake bed, researcher are far better able to control variables and observe tests.

General aviation planes are likely the most common type of aircraft drop-tested at the Landing and Impact Research Facility. This Cessna 172 test was conducted to see if emergency locator transmitters could be better installed onboard.

Yes, the Boeing Starliner was tested at the NASA facility. The space agency will hopefully be splashing down the spacecraft in an ocean in the near future or two astronauts will be waiting on the International Space Station until 2025 to return to Earth.

NASA still drop tests commercial aircraft at the site. The data gathered from dummies will be used to see how actually passengers would hold up in a plane crash. Researchers can then come up with ideas on how to improve the chance of survival and reduce injuries.

A version of this article originally appeared on Jalopnik.