How to Survive a Great Fall

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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. 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 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.

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 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, 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 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, 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

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

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 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 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, 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.

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 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

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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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, 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. 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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. 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 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. 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 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,

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 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

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 you know, feeling weighted versus feeling witless. In the meantime,

check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's some other ship the wets where you'll find all the episodes of this show. If you want to chat about the show with other listeners, there is a Facebook group called Stuff to Blow your Mind Discussion Module, And do a search on that platform and you will find it.

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episode a week. Each episode is a different invention, or at least an episode on a particular invention or a sort of a train of thought with inventions, looking at 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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