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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you 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

(00:26):
mentioned it before. I think you've got a spot in
your heart for it. It's the best seventeen flying Fortress.
Oh of course. Yeah. So this was a gigantic four
engine heavy bomber developed by Boeing that 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

(00:48):
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 killing. I mean that like I know that
you have a kind of love for the aesthetics of
airplane design. Yeah, yeah, I mean, my my dad was
World War Two buff and he and more importantly he
was he was really into creating, to working on scale

(01:10):
model kits and mostly World War Two scale models. And
so the B seventeen uh was certainly a plane that
was one of his favorites. And 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 so yeah, I grew up amid these depictions

(01:33):
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 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

(01:55):
there are like some that are actually still in flight somewhere.
Well they're kept, you know, in an air worthy condition.
And it's harder to keep an older plane like this
in airworthy 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

(02:17):
you can, and even the ones that aren't air worthy,
there are a number of just fantastically restored um B
seven teams in museums aviation 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,

(02:37):
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. 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

(02:58):
a lot of people, of course, and 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 this vessel, this uh, this this airplane you're sitting
up into the sky, sending it into into into enemy
territory to rain bombs down on them, and then you

(03:21):
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 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

(03:45):
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
out the front, you have tailgunner in the back, you
have a turret on the top 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.

(04:10):
It's the ball turret, the lower turret, that is this
pair of manned machine guns inside a plexiglass dome or
ball on the bottom of the aircraft. Yeah, it's I'm
sure it looked science fiction in at the time, and
it still looks science fiction and when you see it now,
if you if you're not expecting it. Uh So, this

(04:31):
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 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

(04:51):
pinpoint a particularly small adult airmen to go into the ball.
And then on top it was in a comfy not comfy,
the exact opposite of comfy, cozy, snug tight. Yeah. In fact,
he is essentially in a fetal position the whole time,
only instead of of having all the warmth and safety

(05:12):
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 underneath this this bomber exposed
to any interceptor aircraft that are flying up underneath, and

(05:32):
hopefully you're gonna be able to do something about it
with your machine guns. And if 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 the parachute uh just above
them in the main fuselage, or if there was room,
you might bring it in strapped to your chest. That's
gonna come back in just a minute. So I've thought

(05:54):
about the ball tour 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 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 nineteen about is World War two experience, and

(06:16):
it captures this, uh, the sort of cramped terror. Here.
It goes from my mother's sleep, I fell into the
state and I hunched in its belly till my wet
fur froze six miles from Earth, 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

(06:36):
with a hose 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 right underneath the plane, so 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

(06:57):
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
trammed into a clear ball, the bottom just exposed. And
then if you have like you know, all these uh

(07:18):
you know, all the chaos of war, the explosions happening
all around you. UM. I recently watched Hulu's adaptation of
Catch twenty 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 in this idea
of just how terrifying a bomber run was even in

(07:39):
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
any you know, a bunch of heroic nonsense, you know,
label ladled on top of it, because ultimately that's what
Catched twenty two is about, dispel ling the hero myth

(08:01):
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, h let's look at the story of
one particular bald turret gunner during World War Two. He
was an American staff sergeant named Alan either Magey or

(08:22):
McGhee m ag e e. I'm gonna call him McGhee
for the rest of the episode here. So, in January
of nineteen forty three, Staff Sergeant McGhee 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 from probably bullets hitting the plane.
I don't know, but that's my guess. So the plane

(08:44):
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
hundred meters up and in the chaos us as the
airplane was coming apart in the atmosphere, McGee managed to

(09:05):
escape his ball, tore it and jump out of the
falling and uh separating plane parts. But he didn't have
a parachute. He had not been wearing one, probably because
he couldn't fit into 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,
there just would be no way you'd survive. You're just

(09:27):
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 McGee 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,

(09:47):
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, McGhee

(10:10):
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, McGhee is
not the only one. There are actually lots of interesting,

(10:32):
fascinating long fall 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 doing.
We're dealing with distances here that are almost this seemed

(10:53):
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 footfall.
But 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 to become just instantly

(11:15):
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 explanations, but it turns out that there are some
pretty consistent, not totally consistent, but there are some common
physical characteristics of the types of falls that people survive from.

(11:38):
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
in fact that's not the case. If if you are

(11:58):
falling long enough to achieve eve 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 you know, a few hundred meters, then you

(12:21):
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 survived is Christine Mackenzie. She didn't actually fall

(12:42):
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 hitting the ground directly, she first hits some suspended

(13:06):
power lines before impact, and sort of like the glass
ceiling and 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 five seconds. So let's let's entertain belief in guardian

(13:28):
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 just assumed I would be. I would assume I
would be torn in half. You know, well, I mean

(13:49):
I'm sure, I'm sure. It depends on how you hit
them and all that. 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 Vesna Volovich was a Serbian flight attendant on a

(14:10):
DC nine that was in the air over the Czech
Republic in nineteen seventy two when the cabin exploded, probably
due to a bomb from a terrorism attack. She fell
more than ten thousand one ms or more than thirty
three thousand feet without a parachute, and she suffered severe
injuries and broken bones and was in a coma for weeks.

(14:32):
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. And then the broken part of the

(14:54):
fuselage in which she was stuck just happened to land
on a snowy recovered 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 sixteen. She's often cited as the record holder for
the survivor of the longest fall without a parachute. Wow,

(15:15):
that that is incredible. And also I just want to
apologize to any other nervous flyers out there who are
listening to this. Hopefully you are 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

(15:36):
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.

(15:58):
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 Julienne Kepki now Julianne 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

(16:18):
an altitude of over three kilometers after a plane was
struck by lightning. She was the lone survivor of the crash.
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.

(16:40):
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, how casting the angels aside?
What are the what are the logical, real life scientific answers? Uh,
you know behind the survive stories where we're gonna take

(17:01):
a break and when we come back we will discuss
just that. Alright, 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,

(17:21):
you know, they're all these sort of like specific cases
of what can happen to you when you 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

(17:42):
going to be the difference between 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,

(18:03):
gravity is relentlessly accelerating you towards the 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

(18:24):
was jumping off of a high dive. Um, and I
had been a long time since I jumped off a
high dive, but I was just really struck by just
the feeling of of of being wanted by gravity that
like you, you really you really feel it, um, you know,
more so than off of just a normal board. You
feel yourself accelerating, You feel yourself, you know, pulled down

(18:46):
with dramatic speed toward the surface of the water. Well, yeah,
it's kind of weird to 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 you
acceleration to provide artificial gravity and space. Right just by
like continuously accelerating a capsule or providing angular momentum acceleration

(19:10):
in a circular pattern, you can pretty much perfectly simulate
what gravity is like. So if you're on or near
the Earth's 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 chugging unless

(19:33):
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 matter what you are,

(19:54):
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 there is no atmosphere.

(20:16):
And this is actually a demonstration that was put on
during a moonwalk by the American astronaut David Scott in
nine 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's fascinating to watch because it seems

(20:39):
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, no air to
slow down the feather. By the way I I looked

(21:01):
it up, it was a falcon feather. 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 song about it
the dove. Uh. So anyway, if you're near Earth's surface

(21:24):
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 a top speed
and get within of it and then wobble up and down,

(21:46):
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 the air, The
weight of the falling object. Obviously, heavier objects have more

(22:06):
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 how dense the
medium is. For example, you can fall faster higher in

(22:28):
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 on all these
kinds of factors, for an adult human falling through the

(22:49):
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 as slowly as possible,

(23:09):
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 bodies like a dart so streamlined head first and
so forth, can accelerate to a much higher terminal velocity

(23:32):
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 reach or not reach,
but approach terminal velocity. Again, this is going to vary

(23:56):
according to all these individual factors about your body and
how you're falling in 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 case of Vestna Volkovich,
the Serbian flight attendant who survived the like thirty three

(24:18):
thousand footfall. According to Weiss quote, a free falling a
hundred and twenty pound or fifty four woman would have
a terminal velocity of about thirty eight meters per second
uh and uh, and she would achieve of the speed
and about seven seconds. This 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

(24:41):
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, and it will be
very fast. It might be, you know, between two hundred
and four hundred kilometers per hour. An interesting side note

(25:03):
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 of constant acceleration
that we're used to in a fall. Normally, we don't
ever reach terminal velocity, so we don't know what it

(25:25):
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
a cushion made of wind. Does that make sense, like
because you're not accelerating anymore, right, right? Yeah? Because like

(25:48):
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 to this point where everything is normalized at
least for a few more seconds. Well there you might.
This is interesting because I sometimes feel like the words

(26:09):
feel it that way too. But you're sort of inverting
the weight less 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 as like you feel weight less when your
body is supported by something, or if you just stop

(26:30):
to contemplate gravity, you can start feeling rather weighted. You know.
It's 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 ft can easily kill a person depending on how

(26:50):
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 applies massive impact force to your body

(27:12):
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
are 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 College London, who says the quote, most

(27:34):
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. Alright, so we have we have
we've described the problem here of falling from a great
height and and and by necessity impacting the ground. We're

(27:56):
gonna take a break. When we come back, we're gonna
discuss what the survival tactics actually are, you know too,
and the extent to which you can actually deploy them
during free fall. Thank all right, we're back. So obviously,
any fall from a great height is going to be
really dangerous and it would probably kill anybody. So these

(28:17):
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. But 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 refer to a couple of pretty good

(28:39):
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 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 associate professor of physics Southeastern Louisiana State

(29:01):
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 of people who actually survive accidental falls. So

(29:23):
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,
into to a certain extent, we've barely had had had

(29:45):
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 lane than
falling out of a tall building from a height of
more than a few hundred feet, because you're gonna reach
similarly high speeds either way. But if you fall out

(30:08):
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 descent, like the figures I was I was
looking at, or that if you were to jump, if
you jump out of a plane at ten thousand feet,
you basically have one minute, uh, not counting you know

(30:30):
any you know, types of shoots you would 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.
Thinner atmosphere, your your lack of access to oxygen means

(30:50):
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.
The Massachusetts based amateur historian Jim Hamilton's has collected reports

(31:11):
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
to survive that than if they fall free of the

(31:34):
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 rider than he has of
people surviving a solo fall like Alan Magee did or
McGee did. And it seems that like airplane seats and
parts of the airplane fuselage and so forth can sometimes

(31:55):
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. All 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
you to be smaller because a person's falling speed is

(32:18):
determined by this negotiation between gravity and air resistance. Gravity,
of course accelerates your fall, but air resistance 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
different ways. It will increase your weight, which helps gravity

(32:38):
overcome air resistance and makes your terminal velocity faster, pulls
you faster. But it 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,
and it turns out the gravity wins out. Even though

(33:00):
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 notoriously great followers. They can fall from
great heights and and suffer no damage. Yeah, there's a

(33:21):
quote from JBS Holliday in writing in who wrote, you
can drop a mouse down a thousand yard mine 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
along similar lines, that it may help to be a child.

(33:44):
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 or have more flexible skeletons,
more relaxed muscle tone us and a higher proportion of

(34:05):
subcutaneous fat which helps protect internal organs. Well, this, this, uh,
you know, matches up with research I've done in the
past on just sort of the durability of children. You know,
especially as parents, we often think of of of young
children as being just you know, highly vulnerable, and in
certain respects they are, but they are also uh, they
have evolved to be durable at that stage as well,

(34:28):
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, And that's something that comes up in
some of the accounts I was looking at, because a

(34:49):
lot of the accounts do involve uh, sky divers, people
who 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,
their shoots are gonna work just like they hope they would.
But when you encounter a technical problem with the shoot,
like sometimes the shoot, even though the shoots failing, it

(35:10):
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 is 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
is a big question where to land. So if you

(35:32):
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
to spread out your slow down over a bigger distance

(35:54):
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, 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 you
decelerate over a longer distance as the net stretches when

(36:17):
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 net
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
that might be kind of equivalent, probably not as good

(36:38):
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
hitting branches at differ front levels instead of stopping at

(37:01):
the ground all at once, you slow your fall. You
kind of put your your your injury on installment plan. 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,
into bushes or into tree limbs. Snow seems to be

(37:23):
a very good choice. There are multiple accounts of people
surviving great falls after landing in snow. I would imagine
that unpacked snow as best. Again, you want, you know,
a softer thing to crash into too slow to increase
your deceleration distance. Hay stacks are apparently good, and then
hitting the roof of some types of human structures can
be better than hitting solid ground. Specifically if you think

(37:46):
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 roope would be ideal as well.
You know, to bring up a pro wrestling example here,
anyone who's watched the pro wrestling has probably seen somebody

(38:08):
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 fall of
the wrestler and hurt the more to just go straight

(38:29):
to the ground. Yeah. The accounts I've heard of from
pro wrestlers of them taking bumps where they say, jump
off of a 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 inside
their body. That is not a feeling I want to feel. Right. So,

(38:50):
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 thatched roof for the or
even the the the the greenhouse, or you know, whatever
is better than just hitting just the you know, an
open pavement area. Yeah, exactly. Again, what you want to

(39:11):
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 weather 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 hitting water after a

(39:33):
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 high
but just do a normal belly flop off of a
normal diving board or cannonball. What have you feel that
smack of water against your body and uh, and you know,
get a sense of what some of the physics we're

(39:54):
talking about here, because that that that smack can sting
and we're talking a fall of like you know, four
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.
If you have to hit water. There's also a question

(40:16):
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? Uh. 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

(40:37):
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 of the maybe not belly flop,

(40:59):
but somehow distribute it 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 divers
landing stance feet together, heels up, flexed knees, and hips.
Keppel argues that studies of people jumping from bridges indicate

(41:21):
that the best way to survive hitting water is probably
what's known as the pencil. So that's like feet first,
knifelike kind of entry. But obviously this doesn't always work.
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.

(41:45):
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, Alan points out that for

(42:05):
some reason, some studies have found that human bodies 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 picture this. This is referred to

(42:27):
as eyeballs in G force as opposed 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

(42:48):
view out of the airplane, but you 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 of the Uh, this particular individual will still be
facing forward, Yeah, because apparently the body is more tolerant
of g forces that way. Uh So, given this consideration,

(43:11):
it might seem like the best way for your body
to absorb impact would be to 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. Uh.

(43:31):
The one last source they look at here is the
Chisholm Mentions, a study by the Highway Safety Research Institute
from n 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,

(43:53):
here we've heard almost every different kind of possible recommendation
for how to orient the body for land accept 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. Yeah. I used

(44:16):
to be a big Kids in the Hall of fan
just because it was you know, it was on TV
all the time, so I was always watching Kids in
the Hall, 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 and finally, Uh,

(44:41):
Bruce McCulloch's character is the last one left on the
plane that that hasn't jumped, and he's there 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, uh,
Bruce's character, you know, says, says says, Uh says, alright, alright, alright,

(45:05):
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 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 Bruce's character says, quote, not good enough. If these parachutes,

(45:29):
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, and he jumps and he's saying it's working,
it's working, it's working, and then there's a splat sound. Right,

(45:50):
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, plummeting 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 any given scenario. Well,

(46:14):
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. No, 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 full fledged papers exploring

(46:36):
a particular topic. And I haven't seen anybody, you know,
uh 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, uh,
hitting the ground running would not work, And this line
of thinking does. Following like you said, with the idea

(46:56):
of well, could you jump out of a crashing plane
right before it hits the ground. And so five. 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. There's virtually no
scenario in which the jump is going to make, you know,

(47:20):
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
a twenty five year old experienced, experienced jumper who encountered
a series of shoot malfunctions from a fifteen thousand foot jump.

(47:42):
And 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, it's where it's
like he's deploying the first shoot doesn't work, Okay, deploying
the second shoot does not work, and uh, and then
he makes a rushed logical peace with death at that

(48:03):
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, ends
up shattering his left foot like really badly, but he survived.

(48:24):
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. But he said in retrospect

(48:44):
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. We falls in line
with some of the advice and uh analysis we looked
at already. Yeah, well, I'd say top lane takeaway today,

(49:06):
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 this 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 that you
know the jury is still out, but that's probably not
going to be your best strategy either. All right, So

(49:26):
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 they're time to shine
because I wanna you know, we want to hear anything
and just about your your your thoughts on this particular topic. Certainly,
if you know anybody who has a survival story like
this or app one yourself to share, we would love

(49:47):
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? In on our various descriptions of

(50:08):
you know, feeling weighted versus feeling witless. In the meantime,
check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
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(50:30):
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at least an episode on a particular invention or a
sort of a train of thought with inventions, looking at

(50:52):
basically human techno history, all this weird technology that humans
uh leave behind and what it says about us, what
it's says about human existence before the advent of these
different inventions. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
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(51:12):
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(51:34):
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