From the Vault: How to Survive a Great Fall

Anticipating a fall from 10,000 feet or more? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss your chances of survival. (Originally published 8/15/2019)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for a Vault episode. This episode originally aired on
August nineteen, and it was called How to Survive a
Great Fall, where we became suddenly obsessed with the question
of what happens if you fall from like airplane altitude?
That's right. Uh this one, this one is a really

(00:26):
fun one gets into, you know, the physics and also
some just amazing stories of human survival. Totally. Let's skydive
right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a
production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you,

(00:48):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I know
you've got a love for older aircraft, so I wanted
to start off talking today about an aircraft. I think
I know you've mentioned it before. I think you've got
a spot in your heart for it. It's the B
seventeen Flying Fortress. Oh of course. Yeah. So this was
a gigantic four engine heavy bomber developed by Boeing that

(01:11):
was used by the United States in World War Two,
primarily for long range, high altitude bombing raids against Germany
and Nazi occupied targets in Europe, and to a lesser
extent it was used some in the Pacific theater. Oh.
And I guess, just to clarify what I said a
minute ago, I mean when I say you've got a
spot in your heart for this, I don't mean like
you love war and bombing. And I mean that like

(01:33):
I know that you have a kind of love for
the aesthetics of airplane design. Yeah. I mean my my
dad was a War War two buff and he and
more importantly he was he was really into creating, to
working on scale model kits, yeah, and mostly War War
two scale models. And so the B seventeen uh was
certainly a plane that was one of his favorites. And

(01:54):
you know, he was always telling me about it, and
he had like a prized model of it, like probably
like you know, his the masterpiece of his his scale
modeling time. Uh and uh And say, I grew up
amid these depictions of the B seventeen. I mean, it's
it's a very iconic plane. Um. And it's the third
most produced bomber of all time. It was an icon

(02:14):
of US air superiority and uh, and it's a highly
successful design and they were used for various post war
purposes as well. And there's actually there's somewhere in the
neighborhood of like I want to say, ten B seventeens
that are actually still airworthy. Oh yeah, I think I
was reading that there are like some that are actually
still in flight somewhere. Well, they're kept, you know, in
in an air worthy condition. And it's harder to keep

(02:37):
an older plane like this in air worthy condition. But
but with a plane that where the design is solid
and it has this iconic status in uh, you know,
in American aviation history, you're going to to to to
keep those going as long as you can. And even
the ones that aren't air worthy, there are a number
of just fantastically restored um B seventeens in museums a

(02:59):
v A museums around the world. Yeah. Uh. And it's
so it was a strategically important aircraft, right, I mean,
so it was this heavily armored aircraft that was played
a huge role in in Allied victory in Europe, and
it was it was sort of famous for like taking
a beating in the course of its mission before returning
to base intact and landing with lots of visible combat damage. Right,

(03:21):
And I guess this is tied up in the idea
of that that it's called the flying fortress. Yeah, And
then again we don't want to romanticize the this weapon
of war too much. It was used to kill a
lot of people, of course, and a lot of people
died flying them. But just from a purely designed standpoint,
it is fascinating because there they were. They really was
this flying fortress. It's this idea that you you have this,

(03:45):
this vessel, this uh, this this airplane you're sitting up
into the sky, sitting it into into into enemy territory
to rain bombs down on them, and then you want
to have it protected. So of course, the main thing
you can do is have if you have fighter planes
to accompany it, faster, subtle uh death machines that can
fly about and pick off things that are trying to

(04:07):
interfere with the bombing fleet. But on top of that,
you need to have some guns on that flying fortress
on your bomber to protect it. But since the bomber
itself is not going to be like super maneuverable, especially
compared to fighters that are coming up to intercept it.
What you need to do is you need to have
all your directions covered. You have some machine guns poking

(04:30):
out the front, you have tailgunner in the back, you
have a turret on the top, uh, side gunners, etcetera.
But one of the defense features of the B seventeen
what you're getting to is now famous, or maybe more
importantly infamous. It's the ball turret that the lower turret,
that is this pair of manned machine guns inside a

(04:51):
plexiglass dome or ball on the bottom of the aircraft. Yeah,
it's I'm sure it looked science fiction e at the time,
and it still looks science fiction and when you see
it now if you're if you're not expecting it. Uh So,
this is the Sperry ball turret. And it was only
introduced in the in the B seventeen E series, but
it was included on in all subsequent series of the

(05:14):
B seventeen bomber. It was also deployed in the B
twenty four Liberator, which is another heavy bomber, and then
a couple of a couple of other planes. But yeah,
it was super small, so small that you typically had
to pinpoint a particularly small adult airmen to go into
the ball, and then on top of it, was in
a comfy uh not comfy, the exact opposite of comfy, cozy,

(05:37):
snug tight yeah. In fact, he is essentially in a
fetal position the whole time. Only instead of of having
all of the warmth and safety that you know comes
with the idea of returning to the womb, you are not.
You are not in the womb in the ball turret.
You're not even in the middle of the plane. You're
you're beneath the plane. You're sort of halfway hanging out

(05:58):
underneath the that this this bomber exposed to any interceptor
aircraft that are flying up underneath, and hopefully you're gonna
be able to do something about it with your machine guns.
And something goes wrong, well, the bad news is there's
there's not actually room in the ball for you to
wear your parachute. Uh. In some cases they would leave

(06:19):
the parachute uh just above them in the main fuselage,
or if there was room, you might bring it in
strapped your chest. That's gonna come back in just a minute.
So I've thought about the ball to it a lot,
Not because I I know nearly as much about about
older aircraft as you, Robert, but because specifically because of
a poem that I read for the first time many

(06:40):
years ago. That it's just a five line poem by
the American poet Randall Jarrell called the Death of the
Ball Turret Gunner. It was written in n about his
World War Two experience, and it captures this, uh, this
sort of cramped terror. Here. It goes from my mother's sleep.
I fell into the state and I hunched in its
belly to all my wet fur froze six miles from earth,

(07:03):
loosed from its dream of life. I woke to black
flak and the Nightmare fighters. When I died, they washed
me out of the turret with a hose. Oh man,
that is rough. I don't think i've heard that before. Um,
I should throw in like a couple of things. So,
first of all, the turret does like rotate and move around.
It's like a little carnival ride underneath the plane. So

(07:25):
you can aim right, Yeah, you need more degrees of
freedom to chase the moving targets that are coming at
you from below. Right, And and on top of that,
I cannot begin to imagine how terrifying it really was.
Like I get a little anxious when I fly in general,
and to imagine myself like slung below this uh this
you know, rattling warplane crammed into a clear ball, the

(07:48):
bottom just exposed. And then if you have like you know,
all these uh you know, all the chaos of war,
the explosions happening all around you. Um. I recently watched
Hulse adaptation of Catch twin two, which is different aircraft,
um and no ball to it, but it does a
great job of just showing, uh, you know, immersing you

(08:09):
in this idea of just how terrifying a bomber run was.
Even in Catch twenty two, they're not even dealing with
interceptor craft. They're just dealing with anti aircraft fire, and
it's they just do a wonderful job of just making
you feel the sheer terror of the characters flying into
battle without you know, a bunch of heroic nonsense, you know,
label ladled on top of it. Because ultimately that's what

(08:31):
Catched twenty two is about, dispelling the hero myth with
a healthy dose of absurdity. Yeah, well, I want to
talk about one of those terrifying experiences and use that
to connect to the subject of the rest of today's episode. So, uh,
let's look at the story of one particular bald her
at gunner during World War Two. He was an American

(08:52):
staff sergeant named Alan either Magey or McGee mg e E.
I'm gonna call him McGee for the rest of the
episode here. So, in January of nineteen forty three, staff
Sergeant McGee was manning the turret of a B seventeen
that had been nicknamed snap crackle pop. Uh. Don't know
what that comes from, but I have to imagine it's

(09:13):
from probably bullets hitting the plane. I don't know, but
that's my guess. So the plane was on a bombing
run over an area of Nazi occupied France when it
suddenly took heavy fire from German fighters and it began
to break apart in the air at about twenty thousand
feet or about six thousand seven meters up and in
the chaos as the airplane was coming apart in the atmosphere,

(09:38):
McGee managed to escape his ball turret and jump out
of the falling and separating plane parts. But he didn't
have a parachute. He had not been wearing one probably
because he couldn't fit in the ball with it on,
so he's outside the plane falling at twenty feet. So
you would think, obviously this is just certain death, right, Yeah,

(09:58):
there just would be no you survive, You're just you're
just dead in the air, basically, Yeah, falling without a
parachute for twenty feet, which is about six point one
kilometers in altitude, there's no way to survive that. But
strangely McGhee didn't die. He lost consciousness during the fall,
probably due to a lack of oxygen, right because up
at that atmosphere, the up that altitude, the atmosphere is thinner.

(10:21):
You can't get enough oxygen, so you pass out. But
then he woke up. He woke up hours later on
the ground to find himself a prisoner of war being
treated by German medics, and he had a few broken
bones and he had cuts all over his body, but
he was alive. Apparently the way McGhee survived had to
do with how he landed. Instead of hitting the ground,

(10:44):
McGhee had just by luck, crashed through a glass ceiling
in a train station at St. Nazaire, and the impact
of crashing through the glass must have slowed his fall
enough that he was not killed when he hit the
floor below. And so as unbelievable as this story is,
McGee is not the only one. There are actually lots

(11:05):
of interesting, fascinating, long false survival stories in which people fall,
you know, what would normally be absolutely lethal distances without
a parachute, but somehow managed to survive in one way
or another. And that's what we wanted to talk about today,
and and it should we should drive home like we're
dealing We're dealing with distances here that are almost this

(11:27):
seems almost absolutely lethal and you certainly do not have
to fall far at all to suffer a fatal injury.
Oh no, you can easily die from a ten or
twenty foot fall. But that they're falling from ten thousand,
twenty thousand feet, it just seems astounding. It seems unreal
Like to survive such a fall, you would just have

(11:48):
to become just instantly hyper religious, right, you just have
to assume angels appeared and uh and took your unconscious
body down to the earth. Well, a lot of people
do kind of go to those miraculous X nations, but
it turns out that there are some pretty consistent, not
totally consistent, but there are some common physical characteristics of

(12:09):
the types of falls that people survive from. It has
to do with how you fall, how you land, where
you land, and so that's what we wanted to explore
for the rest of the day. Now, one thing that's
funny is that, like, it seems like falling out of
an airplane must be so much worse than just say,
falling off of a really tall building or something, but

(12:30):
in fact that's not the case. If if you are
falling long enough to achieve what's called terminal velocity. Will
explain more about that in a bit. It's a speed
that's not a not a constant, but it's going to
vary depending on who you are, what you're what you weigh,
what you're shaped like, what you're wearing, you know how,
all that kind of stuff. As long as you fall
far enough to achieve that, and that might just be

(12:51):
you know, a few hundred meters, then you then you're
basically falling as fast as you're gonna fall, And actually
falling from an airplane isn't any worse and in some
crazy ways could actually be better. Uh So, but anyway, well,
we'll come back to all that, I wanted to talk
about a few other known cases from history. So one
case of somebody who fell out of an airplane and

(13:13):
survived is Christine Mackenzie. She didn't actually fall out of
an airplane. She jumped. She's an experienced South African skydiver
who had already jumped more than a hundred times when
both her main parachute and her backup parachute failed on
the same freefall in August two thousand four, So she
fell about eleven thousand feet and survived by instead of

(13:36):
hitting the ground directly, she first hit some suspended power
lines before impact, and sort of like the glass ceiling
in McGee's fall, the tension of the power lines is
thought to have absorbed a lot of the energy of
her fall and slowed her down in the process, so
that when she finally hit the ground, she ended up
with only a broken pelvis. Her fall lasted about forty

(13:58):
five seconds. So let's let's entertain belief in guardian angels
again for a second. Can you imagine the sort of
scenario where you're falling and then the angel appears and says, look,
I know this looks bad, but don't worry you're headed
towards some high tension wires. Everything's gonna be fine. I

(14:18):
just assume I would be. I would assume I would
be torn in half. You know, Uh well, I mean,
I'm sure, I'm sure. It depends on like how you
hit them. And another name, This one comes up a lot.
It's a very famous case. This is Vesna Volkovich. Some
of the details of the Volovich case have been disputed.
I'm not going to get into those whole disputes. I'm
just going to talk about the version that's most often reported. So.

(14:41):
Vesna Volovich was a Serbian flight attendant on a DC
nine that was in the air over the Czech Republic
in nineteen two when the cabin exploded, probably due to
a bomb from a terrorism attack. She fell more than
ten thousand one or more than thirty three thousand feet
without a parachute, and she suffered severe injuries and broken

(15:04):
bones and was in a coma for weeks. But she survived,
and the question is how well. Her survival is usually
attributed to the fact that while most of the rest
of the passengers were blown out of the cabin when
the fuselage broke apart, Volkovich was pinned inside by a
food card and possibly by another member of the crew
or a passenger, and so she stuck inside the fuselage.

(15:27):
And then the broken part of the fuselage in which
she was stuck just happened to land on a snowy
tree covered hillside, and it's believed that the trees and
the snow cushioned the impact. After she woke up, she
had no memory of the crash, and she lived until
six She's often cited as the record holder for the
survivor of the longest fall without a parachute. Wow. That

(15:49):
that is incredible. And and also I just want to
apologize to any other nervous flyers out there who are
listening to this. Hopefully you're not listening to this at
the airport. Oh maybe we should have warned you now,
you know, if you if you weren't aware by now,
if you didn't pause the episode by now, then I
guess maybe you you do need this episode to make

(16:10):
it through your flight. Well, I'm sure you've heard it
a million times before and it probably doesn't help with
your fear, but it is a fact that flying is
extremely safe. Commercial flying these days is extremely safe. Yes,
if you know, if you are on a commercial jet
with like an accredited pilot and all that. Like your
your chances of having something bad happen are extremely low.
So stick that in the logical side of your brain.

(16:32):
It's probably already arguing with the logical side that is
the whole reason you have the nerves. Anyway, let's go
with one more example here. This is a survival story
of Julien Kepki now Julienne Diller. She's a German woman
or is a German woman who as a teenager survived
a plane crash in the Amazon in ninety one from

(16:53):
an altitude of over three kilometers after a plane was
struck by lightning. She was the lone survivor of the crab.
And then she not only survived the crash from from
over three kilometers of altitude. After that she had to
navigate her way through the rainforest to find help with
no supplies except basically a bag of candy, oh my goodness.

(17:14):
And after searching for ten days she found help from
a group of loggers and was taken back to civilization
for medical treatment. And she's still alive today. So at
this point you're probably wondering, well, well, how casting the
angels aside, what are the what are the logical, real
life scientific answers? Uh, you know behind these survival stories

(17:34):
where we're gonna take a break and when we come
back we will discuss just that. All right, we're back.
So Robert, you want to look at the physics of
falling from a great height. Let's do it. Okay, So
falling from a great height can kill you in a
number of ways. I mean, just not to get too graphic,
but one problem would be like what if you fall
on a spike or something. You know, they're all these

(17:56):
sort of like specific cases of what can happen to
you when hit the ground. But that's the key, right right,
the fall itself. I mean, that's that's easy enough to do.
Um And surviving the fall is one thing. It's surviving
the impact that is the problem, right, I mean, no
matter where you land, the main problem that that you're
going to encounter is going to be the difference between

(18:18):
how fast you were falling and how suddenly you stop.
Uh So, what happens when you fall from an incredible altitude? Well,
we know there is gravity, right, There's an attraction between
the Earth and your body due to gravity, and gravity
accelerates you relentlessly towards the center of the Earth, not
just when you're falling, but even right now, no matter
where you are, gravity is relentlessly accelerating you towards the

(18:40):
center of the Earth, and you will continue to accelerate
towards the center of the Earth until something like the ground,
or water or the air provides a compensating resistance to
stop you from from going faster towards the center of
the Earth. So that's probably the ground that's doing that
to you right now. Yeah. I recently was thinking a
bit about this when I was jumping off of a
high dive. Um, and I had been a long time

(19:03):
since I jumped off a high dive, but I was
just really struck by just the feeling of of of
being wanted by gravity. Like you you really you really
feel it, uh, you know, more so than off of
just a normal board. You feel yourself accelerating. You feel yourself,
you know, pulled down with dramatic speed toward the surface
of the water. Well, yeah, it's kind of weird to

(19:24):
think about, but the force of gravity and the force
of acceleration feel exactly the same to us. They are indistinguishable.
They act the same way on our bodies. This is
why you can use acceleration to provide artificial gravity and space.
Right just by like continuously accelerating a capsule or providing
angular momentum acceleration and a circular pattern, you can pretty

(19:46):
much perfectly simulate what gravity is like. So if you're
on or near the Earth surface, you are sort of
permanently on an invisible train that wants to begin accelerating
straight down at nine point eight meters per second per second,
and we'll just keep going nine point eight meters per
second faster every second, and it's always going to start

(20:06):
chugging unless there's something pushing you back, pushing you to
hold you in place. Now, there's one physics fact we
all i think learned in school, which can be kind
of confusing here, So we need to make a sort
of obvious but important distinction. The acceleration due to gravity
is the same for all falling objects near Earth's surface.
That's nine point eight meters per second per second, no

(20:27):
matter what you are, what kind of object you're talking about.
But that does not mean that all objects fall at
the same rate. This is obvious because of the effects
of drag caused by air resistance acting on the falling object.
So this is pretty obvious. When you drop a feather
and a hammer side by side, obviously the hammer hits
the ground first, unless say you're on the Moon where

(20:49):
there is no atmosphere. And this is actually a demonstration
that was put on during a moonwalk by the American
astronaut David Scott in they were out on the Have
you seen the video of this, Robert, I have, yes, Uh,
it's it's impressive. There also have been some recent videos
that that have been put together using a vacuum chamber,
but they're also just as Uh. It is fascinating to

(21:12):
watch because it seems it defies expectations because our expectations
are based on a world of atmosphere exactly right. Yeah,
and the and the vacuum chamber and on earth works
just as good because it's nothing about the gravitational properties
of the Moon that make the feather fall just as
fast as the hammer. It's the fact, like you say,
that there is no atmosphere to push up against it, uh,

(21:32):
not no air to slow down the feather. By the
way I I looked it up, it was a falcon feather. Huh.
I wonder without knowing the answer, if if there was
like a committee that decided that, where they're like, what
kind of feather are we sending on the mission and
someone's like, oh, it should be the turkey, and it
should be it should be an American eagle. Uh just
like in basically have the same conversation. They had a

(21:53):
song about it the dove. Uh So, Anyway, if you're
near Earth's surface and you're falling, gravity is going to
keep accelerating you faster and faster until the drag of
the atmosphere on your body, which we call air resistance,
stops you from speeding up anymore. And there you level
out at a top speed, and it's never gonna be
an exactly perfect level top speed. You sort of approach

(22:16):
a top speed and get within of it and then
wobble up and down, and we call this terminal velocity. Now,
exactly how fast terminal velocity is depends on a number
of factors. It's the shape of the falling object. Like
a one pound dart will fall faster than a one
pound blanket, right because the blanket spreads out it catches

(22:36):
the air. The weight of the falling object obviously heavier
objects have more power to overcome the air resistance forces
on them. The position or orientation of the following object.
So imagine you drop a plate and you could drop
it flat side down or you could drop it thin
side down, and that's going to make a difference. Another
thing is what medium the object is falling through and

(22:58):
how dense the medium is. For example, you can fall
faster higher in the atmosphere because the gas around you
is thinner. This is something that these high altitude jumpers
of experience, like Felix bomb Gardner, you know, went up
super high in the atmosphere and jumped and was going
faster earlier in the jump, but got slowed down as
the atmosphere got thicker closer to the ground. So, based

(23:20):
on all these kinds of factors, for an adult human
falling through the atmosphere with no parachute, terminal velocity is
going to vary a lot. Of A common figure I've
seen cited for an adult human is that terminal velocity
might be somewhere around a hundred kilometers per hour, which
is about fifty four meters per second, or about a
hundred and twenty miles per hour. And this seems to
be the case, maybe if you are trying to fall

(23:42):
as slowly as possible, say in a belly flop position,
which sort of turns your body into a bio parachute,
right because you try to spread out and catch as
much wind as possible. But I was reading an article
by Frazer Kine at Universe Today, and he claimed that
the skydivers who orient their body is like a dart
so streamlined head first and so forth, can accelerate to

(24:04):
a much higher terminal velocity of more like four hundred
kilometers per hour, which is around a hundred and eleven
meters per second, which is like double the speed of
the belly flop orientation we were just talking about. And again,
of course it varies depending on other factors about your body,
your clothes and all that. Another thing that's going to
vary is how far you have to fall before you

(24:25):
reach or not reach, but approach terminal velocity. Again, this
is going to vary according to all these individual factors
about your body and how you're falling and all that.
But I've come across some wildly different estimates. So one
article I was reading in The Guardian by Ian sample
consulted Howie Weiss, who is a professor of mathematics at
Penn State University, to calculate the rules, specifically for the

(24:47):
case of Vestna Volkovich, the Serbian flight attendant who survived
the like thirty three thousand footfall. According to Weiss quote,
a free falling a hundred and twenty pound or fifty
four woman would have a turn rminal velocity of about
thirty eight meters per second uh and UH, and she
would achieve of the speed and about seven seconds. This

(25:09):
means that she would be falling about as fast as
possible after falling for only a hundred and sixty seven
meters or about five hundred and fifty feet. Other estimates
for human terminal velocity takes significantly more time and distance,
but suffice to say that if you fall out of
an airplane at cruising altitude, there is no doubt that
you will end up falling as fast as you possibly can,

(25:30):
and it will be very fast. It might be, you know,
between two hundred and four hundred kilometers per hour. An
interesting side note is just some anecdotes I was reading
about about skydiving that mentioned what it feels like when
you approach terminal velocity on a fall, Like, apparently the
body sensation is different from the sensation during that period

(25:53):
of constant acceleration that we're used to in a fall. Normally,
we don't ever reach terminal velocity, so don't know what
it feels like. So we think of a fall as
this feeling of weightlessness, you know, the free fall feeling.
But apparently once you get in your terminal velocity, I've
seen some people claim you sort of feel your weight again.
You sort of feel as if you are resting on

(26:15):
a cushion made of wind. Does that make sense, like,
because you're not accelerating anymore, right, right? Yeah? Because like
I said when I when I jump off jumped off
the high dive a couple of weeks ago, I definitely
felt acceleration. I did not feel weightless. I felt very weighted. Um.
But yeah, if you're reaching the point where where you're
no longer accelerating, yeah, it seems like you would you
would reach this point where everything is normalized at least

(26:38):
for a few more seconds. Well, there you might. This
is interesting because I sometimes feel like the words feel
it that way too. But you're sort of inverting the
weightless versus weighted feeling right, Like do astronauts who are
forever accelerating because they're forever in free fall do they
feel weight less or weighted? I guess they would say
weight less, but yeah, you could also think of it

(26:58):
as like you feel way less when your body is
supported by something, or if you just stop to contemplate gravity,
you can start feeling rather weighted. You know it's the because, again,
these forces are acting on us at all all times.
We just are used to a certain level. As we
brought up a minute ago. We know from lots of
human experience that a fall from just like ten can

(27:22):
easily kill a person depending on how they land, and
in those cases, you wouldn't be traveling anywhere near your
terminal velocity. So obviously hitting the ground from a fall
of a few hundred meters or more is going to
cause massive trauma to the body and will almost always
result in death. But like, how what actually happens here
in the body? Well, since falling from a great height

(27:43):
applies massive impact force to your body when you hit
the ground, there are a lot of different ways for
the fall to kill you, but apparently the most common
fatal injury is caused by a fall or arterial damage
due to the breaking of the spine. Sorry to get
graphic here for a second, but this is just for
the sake of specificity. Uh. The article in the Guardian
quote Sean Hughes, who's a professor of surgery at Imperial

(28:06):
College London, who says the quote, most people who fall
from a great height die because they fracture their spine
near the top and so transsect the a order which
carries blood out of the heart. And so obviously that
pretty clear why that would kill you. That that's very bad,
all right, So we have we have we've described the
problem here of falling from a great height and and

(28:28):
and by necessity impacting the ground. We're gonna take a break.
When we come back, we're going to discuss what the
survival tactics actually are, you know too, and the extent
to which you can actually deploy them during free fall.
Thank alright, we're back. So obviously any fall from a
great height is going to be really dangerous and it

(28:49):
would probably kill anybody. So these high altitude survival stories
are very unlikely, and you should not get it in
your head that you can like jump out of an
airplane and survive it. There are some factors that appear
to increase a person's odds of surviving a great fall
out of the sky, at least based on the anecdotes
we have, so let's talk about them. I wanted to

(29:12):
refer to a couple of pretty good articles I found
on this subject, sort of collecting the opinions of experts
over the years on long free falls. One was a
two thousand ten article in Popular Mechanics by Dan Keppel.
One was a more recent article in NPR by Paul Chisholm.
And the Paul Chisholm article and NPR spoke to an

(29:32):
associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana State University named
Rhet Alan, who pointed out that obviously, human survival of
long free falls is not something you can run real
life experiments on. You can't push people out of airplanes
to test it out, so we can only reason based
on sort of hypothetical scenarios and by analyzing the anecdotes

(29:54):
of people who actually survive accidental falls. So we're sort of,
you know, it's kind of like digging up fossils. It's
like we're stuck with whatever data happened to have already
you know, been available to us. Yeah, and it's also
it's kind of a it's very much like it's a
modern problem that's presented itself, you know. I mean we've
barely had airplanes and uh, you know, and into a

(30:16):
certain extent, we've barely had had had the sort of
massive structures or even access to some of the massive
features to to engage in these types of falls to
begin with. Sure, all right, so first question, how to fall?
Capital points out that you're you're actually probably better off
falling out of a plane than falling out of a
tall building from a height of more than a few

(30:37):
hundred feet, because you're gonna reach similarly high speeds either way.
But if you fall out out of a building, you
don't really have any time, right, You're gonna hit the
ground pretty much before you know it, Whereas if you
fall out of the sky a few thousand meters up,
you may actually have more time to plan your descend. Yeah,
like the figures I was I was looking at or
that if you were to jump, if you jump out

(30:59):
of a plane at a thousand feet, you basically have
one minute, uh not counting you know, any you know,
types of shoots you a deploy et cetera. But you
basically have a minute of of of of descent. Now
there are some downsides there too, though, jumping out of
a plane. Uh, if you're higher up in the atmosphere,
it's very possible that you could pass out due to hypoxia.

(31:21):
Thinner atmosphere, your your lack of access to oxygen means
that you black out and then maybe you know, you
are not able to actually plan your descent at all
because you because you're unconscious. Of course, I don't know
if there's anything you can do about that other than
if you know, you always want to have an oxygen
mask with you. That that doesn't seem very practical. Uh.

(31:41):
The Massachusetts based amateur historian Jim Hamilton's has collected reports
of free fall survivors and noticed a few trends about
survival rates in the different ways that people fall. So,
passengers from airplanes, he finds, are more likely to survive
if they arrive at the ground among other wreckage. He
calls these people wreckage riders. That's that they're more likely

(32:05):
to survive that than if they fall free of the
plane and hit the ground. Independently, He's found almost three
times as many cases of people surviving from airplane altitude
as a as a wreckage writer than he has of
people surviving a solo fall like Alan Magee did or
McGee did. And it seems that like airplane seats and

(32:25):
parts of the airplane fuselage and so forth can sometimes
have a protective cushioning effect at the point of impact.
So like, so you hit the ground, and sometimes these
things can absorb some of the energy or or slow
your deceleration. Al right, so if it all possible, be
a wreckage writer, right. Chisholm points out that not like
you have any control over this, but it helps helps

(32:48):
you to be smaller because a person's falling speed is
determined by this negotiation between gravity and air resistance. Gravity
of course accelerates your fall, but air resistant slows you
down and puts a limit on how much gravity can
accelerate you. So as a human increases in size, this
is going to affect the falling body equation in two

(33:09):
different ways. It will increase your weight, which helps gravity
overcome air resistance and makes your terminal velocity faster, pulls
you faster, but will also increase your surface area. So
as you increase your surface area, you increase your drag
and function more like a parachute. So you just have
to look into the math of which of these factors
wins out as like a normal like mammal becomes bigger,

(33:32):
and it turns out the gravity wins out. Even though
you increase your surface area, the extra weight makes a
bigger difference. So like if you drop an ant off
your roof, it's probably gonna be fine when it hits
the ground. You drop a horse off your roof, not
so much. Oh yeah, I mean insects and other invertebrates
are are a notorously great followers. They can fall from

(33:52):
great heights and and suffer no damage. Yeah. There's a
quote from JBS holiday In writing in n who wrote,
you can drop a mouse down a thousand yard mind shaft,
and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight
shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man
is broken, a horse splashes. Uh. Keppel's article notes also

(34:14):
along similar lines, that it may help to be a child.
For some reason, many of the survivors of airplane related
free fall or children, And this is obviously anecdotal, but
the trend probably indicates something. Uh. He writes quote. The
Federal Aviation Agency study notes that kids, especially they're those
under the age of four, have more flexible skeletons, more

(34:36):
relaxed muscle tonus, and a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat,
which helps protect internal organs. Well, this, this, uh matches
up with research I've done in the past on just
sort of the durability of children. Yeah. You know, especially
as parents, we often think of young children as being
just you know, highly vulnerable, and in certain respects they are,

(34:57):
but they are also uh, they having all to be
durable at that stage as well, and to you know,
to survive falls and stumbles and the you know, the
various kind of hazards that they are inevitably going to
encounter at that age. Also, this feature of falling might
be obvious, but if you can somehow slow yourself down
with some kind of parachute like object, that's good. Yeah,

(35:20):
And that's something that comes up in some of the
accounts I was looking at, because a lot of the
accounts do involve uh, sky divers, people who are of
course putting themselves in a position like this on a
regular basis, you know, actually falling through the sky and
you know, most of the time, they you know that
their shoots are gonna work just like they hope they would.
But when you encounter a technical problem with the shoot,

(35:41):
like sometimes the shoot even though the shoots failing, it
is still sort of like half deploying or it's doing
something to spin them around and and potentially uh, you know,
disrupt their acceleration. Yeah. I mean anything that is slowing
you down as good, even if it's not slowing you
down as much as it's supposed to. If it's slowing
you down some, that's increasing your odds. Okay, next question

(36:04):
is a big question where to land. So if you
accept that you can somewhat steer your fall by the
way you orient your body in the air, you might
have some amount of power over exactly where you come down. Uh.
And the bottom line for for where you land is
that you want to increase your deceleration distance. You want

(36:24):
to spread out your slow down over a bigger distance
rather than slowing down and stopping all at once. So
if you like in a cartoon, if you could aim
for the mattress factory exactly, Yeah, that would be where
you would want to land. And this is why landing
in a net helps or something. You know, the net,
like the tension of it absorbs some of the energy
of your fall and it slows down your deceleration or

(36:47):
do you decelerate over a longer distance as the net
stretches when it catches you. So if you could actually
aim for any enormous circus tent like that would be ideal,
not I mean, and if there happened to be a
netted inside the circus tent for the trapeze artist, you know,
I guess that would help as well. Right now, normally
there's not going to be a net out anywhere that
you would be falling, but some there are some things

(37:10):
that might be kind of equivalent, probably not as good
as a net. Falling into trees or bushes seems to
have both positives and negatives, but I think the positives
might outweigh the negatives. By hitting plant matter, you increase
your deceleration distance and you slow your fall more gradually,
because I mean, you probably are going to get very
injured if you fall into plant matter. But by like

(37:32):
hitting branches at different levels instead of stopping at the
ground all at once, you slow your fall. You kind
of put your your your injury on the installment plant. Yeah,
but then also you, I mean, there are downsides. You
run the risk of being like stabbed by branches as
you fall into trees, but there are people who have
survived really long falls by falling into thick plant matter,

(37:54):
into bushes or into tree limbs. Snow seems to be
a very good choice. There are multiple accounts of people
surviving great falls after landing in snow. I would imagine
that unpacked snow is best. Again, you want, you know,
a softer thing to crash into too slow to increase
your deceleration distance. Haystacks are apparently good. And then hitting

(38:14):
the roof of some types of human structures can be
better than hitting solid ground. Specifically if you think that
the roof might that you might break through the roof
like Alan McGee crashing through the glass skylight at the
train station, because this breakthrough point is going to slow
your fall without completely stopping you all at once. Yeah,
or like a thatched roof would be ideal as well.

(38:37):
You know, to bring up a pro wrestling example here,
anyone who has watched the pro wrestling has probably seen
somebody fall off of something through a table, through something
like a folding table, it makes an impressive noise. It
looks impressive to watch this falling body. Uh you know
destroy a table, sometimes two or three tables on the
way down. But of course ultimately that is breaking the

(39:00):
fall of the wrestler and hurt the more to just
go straight to the ground. Yeah. The accounts I've heard
of from pro wrestlers of them taking bumps where they say,
jump off of the top rope and land just on
their back at the ringside, like that has been Like,
those have been the scarier bumps they've described where they
talk about their like feeling their organs like jostle around

(39:20):
inside their body. That is not a feeling I want
to feel. Right. So, in the same way, if you're
falling off the top rope, you should aim for the
tables and uh, you know, even if it's not completely cafe.
And if you're jumping out of the if you're falling
out of that plane, you should aim for the thatch,
groof for the or even the the the greenhouse or
you know, whatever is better than just hitting just the

(39:42):
you know, an open pavement area. Yeah, exactly. Again, what
you want to think is something that will make you
not stop all at once. Now, A big question here
is actually about water. There's disagreement about whether water is
a good choice. Hitting water at high speed is not
like jumping off the high dive. Hitting water at high
speed will still cause massive injuries. It's often said that

(40:06):
hitting water after a great fall isn't that much different
from hitting concrete. Right. However, I will say, do a
belly flop off the high dive, or actually, don't do
a belly flop off the hide, but don't just do
a normal belly flop off of a normal diving board
or a cannonball. What have you feel that smack of
water against your body and uh, and you you get

(40:26):
a sense of what some of the physics we're talking
about here, because that that that smack can sting, and
we're talking a fall of like you know, four or
five feet, yeah, exactly. Uh. And then also with water,
you had the risk that even if you survived the impact,
you could be injured or knocked unconscious. And then you're
at risk of drowning, right because you're in the water. Uh.

(40:47):
If you have to hit water, there's also a question
of how best to orient your body. I guess we
can look at that along with the next question, which
is how to land, not where to land U. So
there's conflicting advice and research indications here. There there are
very few clear takeaways except don't land on your head, right.
But to explore the discrepancies we've come across, so, Keppel's

(41:11):
article introduces the difficulty in knowing the best way to
position the body for impact. Uh. Kepple looks at in
nineteen forty two study in the journal war Medicine that
seemed to be of the opinion that the best bet
is distribution of impact pressure across the body through quote
wide body impact. So that makes it sound like you'd
want a belly flop off there, Maybe not belly flop,

(41:33):
but somehow distributed across the body, uh, you know, longitudinally.
Then again, there was a nineteen sixty three report by
the Federal Aviation Agency that argued that survival is most
likely if you get into quote the classic sky diver's
landing stance feet together. Heals up flexed knees and hips.
Keppel argues that studies of people jumping from bridges indicate

(41:55):
that the best way to survive hitting water is probably
what's known as the pence. So that's like feet first
knife like kind of entry. But obviously this doesn't always work. Uh.
And he also points out the tradition of cliff divers
of Acapulco who dive head first from great heights and
they lock their hands together with arms outstretched over their
heads to protect their heads from the impact with the water.

(42:19):
He also advises for water landings quote clinch your butt.
So unfortunately it seems like a jumble of conflicting advice there,
and and it doesn't get any better with the other
sources we were looking at. Chisholm's article consults some experts
here that also are not in agreement. Uh. The the
the expert we mentioned earlier, at Alan points out that
for some reason, some studies have found that human bodies

(42:42):
seem to be generally more tolerant of G forces in
particular directions, like NASA figured this out during some of
their experiments with test pilots in the nineteen sixties, that
the body seems more tolerant of G forces pushing from
the front of the body to the back. This is
referred to and you sort of pay sure this This
is referred to as eyeballs in G force as opposed

(43:03):
to eyeballs out up or down. Other types of forces
such as eyeballs down are more traumatic to the body.
So I hadn't really thought about this, but but it
makes sense when you when you look at various um
like especially like supersonic aircraft. You may, of course you're
gonna have a pilot position where they need to have
a forward facing view out of the airplane, but you

(43:24):
may have other roles in the plane that do not
require that, or even you know, do not allow a
direct forward facing view out of the plane. And in
those cases you still have the uh, this particular individual
will still be facing forward, Yeah, because apparently the body
is more tolerant of g forces that right. Um So,
given this consideration, it might seem like the best way

(43:47):
for your body to absorb impact would be the land
on your back face up. But there's a problem with that,
which is that it seems like this would be more
likely to generate a harder impact on the head, which
is exactly what you don't want to do, to say
nothing of the spine. I mean, it's almost like we're
not designed for this kind of impact at all, exactly.
You know, it's it's bad no matter how you do it.
There one last source they look at here is the

(44:09):
Chisholm mentions, a study by the Highway Safety Research Institute
from ninety which looked at over a hundred case studies
of fall victims, and note that these were short distance falls,
probably not terminal velocity falls. But the study found that
landing feet first gives you the best survival odds. So basically,
here we've heard almost every different kind of possible recommendation

(44:32):
for how to orient the body for landing except land
on your head. You don't want to land on your head.
I would have to say that this seems like an
area in which the science is not settled. So when
we were, you know, looking into this, I have to
say that the first thing that came into my mind
was the Kids in the Hall sketch. Really yeah, I
used to be a big Kids in the Hall of

(44:53):
fan just because it was you know, it was on
TV all the time, so I was always watching Kids
in the Hall. I loved Kids in the Hall. Oh yeah,
it's some some wonderful sketches in there. But there was
a particular sketch from season one titled The Odds, during
which a bunch of sky divers are encountering just a
series of fatal parachute mishaps, one after the other, and

(45:13):
and finally, uh, Bruce McCulloch's character is the last one
left on the plane that that hasn't jumped, and he's
they're having a discussion with Mark McKinney's character, and Bruce's
character begins discussing the odds of this series of terrible
jumps occurring the way they occurred, and he finally reaches
an illogical conclusion. So Bruce's character, you know, says, says, says, says, right, alright, alright,

(45:39):
you know it's like, okay, well, what are the odds
of all this happening? Where the odds of four individuals
plumbing to their deaths with one of them being on
the very first jump, two of them being twins, and
then one winning the lottery, Like all of these these
odds would make it just just insurmountable. And then Mark's
character tells him what would be roughly sixty three million
to one, and Ruce's character says, quote, not good enough.

(46:02):
If these parachutes, I've been watching them defy the odds
all day. I'm jumping without one, and then he takes
off his parachute and he says, he asked, what are
the odds of a guy jumping from ten thousand feet
and hitting the pavement running? And Mark tells him two
to one, and then Bruce says, good, I'm off, and
he said, I'm feeling lucky. He jumps and he's saying
it's working, it's working, it's working, and then there's a

(46:23):
splat sound. Right. But so so, I have to say
I've never given the scenario a lot of scrutiny, but
I do think of it every single time someone discusses
hitting the ground running on the topic. I imagine um,
Bruce McCulloch, um, you know, plumbting to his death with
this optimism in mind. And I think that the kid
is kind of a fun send up of our basic
inability to comprehend large numbers or or the odds of

(46:47):
any given scenario. Well, it makes me think about that
old thing where it's like, if you're in a in
a plane that's going down or an elevator that's falling,
if you jump at the last second, then you'll be fine. Yeah,
that's not how it works, isn't you know? Not not
at all. And by the way I look to see,
I was thinking, Well, kids in the hall has been
out a while, and people are always doing you know,
kind of interesting like physics based blog post or even

(47:08):
full fledged papers exploring a particular topic. And I haven't
seen anybody you know, um myth bust uh this particular sketch.
Yet maybe I'm wrong. If I am wrong, someone please
send me in some myth busting on this. But I
think the basic idea is hitting the ground running would
not work. And this line of thinking does fall in,

(47:29):
like you said, with the idea of well, could you
jump out of a crashing plane right before it hits
the ground and survive? And this question, these questions in general,
tend to ignore the fact that you're not merely a
board of falling plane. You're falling with the plane, and
if you jump off the plane, you're still falling at
the same pace with the same acceleration. Especially at high speeds.

(47:50):
There's virtually no scenario in which the jump is going
to make, you know, a huge difference. But when I
was looking around about this, I did run across another
account of survival from a fall of a great height. Uh,
similar scenario to some of the ones we've discussed already. Uh.
It was the It's the story of two thousand six
survival story of the twenty five year old experienced experienced

(48:11):
jumper who encountered a series of shoot malfunctions from a
fifteen thousand foot jump and uh, there there's an interview
with this guy on Vice. Uh and basically he tried everything. Um,
you know, he had a very logical fall, you know,
where he's like, he's deploying the first shoot doesn't work. Okay,
deploying the second shoot, uh does not work. And uh,

(48:33):
and then he kind of makes a rushed logical peace
with death at that point where he's like, Okay, I've
done everything, I can do, nothing else I can do.
I'm I'm probably gonna die. And he essentially goes limp
and falls and impacts in a small BlackBerry bush, like
not a huge bush, but you know, a fairly small
one by his description. He ends up shattering his left

(48:54):
foot like really badly, but he survived. He didn't hit
the ground vertically but and so so the impact was
you know, deflected through his body. And in the Vice
interview he recommended his recommendations for falling, which he said,
ultimately he he didn't have any logical um strategy in mind.
He just was like, Okay, I guess I'm hitting the ground.

(49:16):
But he said in retrospect he would say don't tense up,
you know, in the same and then we see this
in discussion of car crashes as well, like like don't
tense your body for the impact if if you at
all have any say so in this. And then also
land in a shrub or a tree if you can,
which falls in line with some of the advice and
uh analysis we looked at already. Yeah, well i'd say

(49:39):
top lane takeaway today. Don't jump out of an airplane
without a parachute. Don't fall out of an airplane without
a parachute if you can help it. If you are
in the scenario, see if you can land in like
some snow and try not to land on your head. Right.
And as for the kids in the Hall method, I
guess you know, the jury is still out, but that's
probably not going to be your best strategy either. All right,

(50:00):
So there you have it. Uh. The fun thing about
this episode is that I know we have some skydivers
out there. We have to have some skydivers. We've heard
from skydivers before. All right, Well, now it's really there
time to shine because I wanna you know, we want
to hear anything just about your your your thoughts on
this particular topic. Certainly if you know anybody who has
a survival story like this or app on in yourself

(50:21):
to share, we would love to hear that. But just
in general, like your your thoughts on on the you know,
the feeling, the sensation of of of descending through the
air at these these great speeds and with these great,
great distances. What is that like? We would love to
hear from you. What does it feel like to hit
terminal velocity when you freefall? Yeah? Where do you fall

(50:41):
in on? Our various descriptions of you know, feeling weighted
versus feeling weightless. In the meantime, check out stuff to
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(51:03):
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(51:24):
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(51:44):
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(52:05):
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