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Kenny Powers: Wrong Man, Right Time
The search for Kenny Powers, the man who attempted to jump the St. Lawrence Seaway in a rocket-powered Lincoln.
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Story: Richard S. Chang
It was two years ago when I first saw the video of Kenny Powers attempting to jump a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental over the St. Lawrence River, from Morrisburg, Canada, to Ogden Island, New York, a distance of more than a mile. At first, the brief clip was a simple four-minute diversion, no different than the countless other diversions that occurred that day and have occurred every day since. It had all the right ingredients: Powers, a grizzled bar brawl of a stuntman with a dark mustache and gruff goatee, limited teeth, who, dressed in a slack yellow jumpsuit and cowboy hat, looked like a trailer-park janitor. There was the boxy Continental, also yellow and plainly unaerodynamic; the ailerons jutting from both doors seemed scaled for a smaller car. A ramp canted up a mound of earth. A paltry crowd had gathered to watch the stunt—supposedly the longest jump ever attempted in a car at that point, which, according to the video, was 1976. It’s known as the Super Jump.
The actual stunt lasts 14 seconds, including the eight seconds it takes for the car to shoot down the runway and up the ramp and the six seconds it takes for it to float down to the water, its descent slowed by two parachutes, deployed early because, upon leaving the ramp, the car dissipates immediately into a spray of body panels, like a bird hit by buckshot. Despite the parachutes, the car falls none too gracefully into the water—barely beyond the mud banks below the ramp. The rescue workers are hardly thigh deep as they wade to the car. Powers emerges with a broken back, the narrator says over a squeaky soundtrack of circus music. His crumpled body is carried back to land and hauled away on a stretcher.
“As the ambulance rushed off to the hospital, all that remained of his $1 million attempt was a yellow, rocket-powered Continental floating aimlessly on the banks of the St. Lawrence River,” says the narrator. The video ends in a P.O.V. heading up the runway onto the ramp, into the sky. Here, it ends abruptly.
And I could have easily just watched the video, e-mailed it to some friends and completely forgotten about the Super Jump and Kenny Powers were it not for a particular weakness of mine: I am innately drawn to great acts of failure. I am seduced by unfounded ambition just as Martin Scorsese is seduced by Leonardo DiCaprio. And in the range of great failures, the Super Jump was Mount St. Helens. I found myself thinking about the stunt.
With not much digging around, I found out that the four-minute video didn’t tell the whole story. The Super Jump was the seven-year dream of another stuntman named Ken Carter. Nicknamed “The Mad Canadian,” Carter harbored an all-consuming ambition to be known as the world’s greatest stuntman. He worked on the Super Jump for years, and a feature-length documentary was made about his efforts, called The Devil at Your Heels. It was produced nearly 30 years ago by the National Film Board of Canada and was as good a place to start as any. But as I began to research the film and filmmakers, it felt like a cinematic cold case. According to the Internet Movie Database, its director, Robert Fortier, hadn’t made a movie in over a decade. There were five producers on the film, but only one seemed to be active. I decided to give him a call.
Check out our collection of other entertaining automotive leaps.
Thats a really cool story...keep on it!
Cool...and whacky. NFB has many (all?) of their films available online. http://www.nfb.ca/film/devil_at_your_heels/
Great video, cool concept, terrible engineering.
A real Kenny Powers who was into cars. Love it.
Kenny Powers died in 2009. http://www.tptrash.com/regal/viewtopic.php?p=72982&sid=8181544cde4292a2c9099f58fe9e23fe
I tried for years to contact Kenny Powers, and called different race tracks in the south. I came close but never did have a chance to talk to him. I did however talk in length to Jim Deist (parachute safety) and he said the whole thing was a "scary sitiuation". I have a bunch of Ken Carter collectables and like the author says many cold leads.
Hi Andrew, I'm doing some research about Ken Carter and would love to know what kind of collectibles you have? If you happen upon this, please contact me! Bookerthe4th@gmail.com
My nickname is Butch and I am the brother of Ken Carter. I'll talk to ya. 514-895-7045
The car should have been tested in a wind tunnel. Iwas in the Air force, and setting "trim" on an airplane is very precise. There's all kinds of aerodynamic things that can go wrong, even the rotating engine and wheels can cause gyroscopic inertial effects (that's why motorcycles stay upright, because of the spinning wheels). We spend years designing and testing new jet planes, and even then lots of things go wrong before the bugs are worked out. The car seemed to "pitch up" as it left the ramp due to the force of air beneath the undercarriage. It was not designed to fly, you'd need computerized, movable wind vanes or fins to stabilize it during flight, like they have on the B-2 bomber. Just make a simple paper airplane and try to throw it straight--you'd have to bend the paper here and there through trial and error to set it's trim before it flies straight and level. Yeah, we need flying cars.
ha! thats my hometown!
[...] How Kenny ended up on the ramp is cooler than the video. It’s a 3 minute read that I linked for you here. [...]
i have the video "the devil at your heels". it was shown on australian abc television back in about 91. they also released the video for purchase which i bought. it was actually shown on a comedy programme late at night. the guys hosting the show were looking for really bad movies and documentaries for a laugh . this was so funny they bought the rights so they could show it. you could see that the makers of the movie were taking the piss out of him even asking him at one stage "ken do you think your sane". the way he always talked about himself in the second third and fourth persons. every time some one tries to use an "idiom" to make an impressive point always get them completely wrong. i loved how slamin sammy miller was more focused on the backers money than safety. he wanted ken carter off that ramp as soon as he could he didnt seem to care if he died. ken carter loses his nerve so much that all you could hear toward the end of the film when he was training and visualising for the jump was "i'm listening for the word ABORT". the guys who were putting the car together tested the fuel tank on the car and blew the front end off. then attempting another two times to get the fuel tank to work (both times exploding) they do a runner. i love the interview for the wide world of sport when ken's talking to evel. it seems someone calling a person evel. the list goes on. there is so many golden comedy moments in this film, its too good you couldnt write this stuff. ken carter is one of my greatest heros because it shows you even a complete #$ck up can rob the rich on this hair brained scheme.