Three Minutes Till Impact

like you've got cotton in the back of your mouth. Yeah, but you might seem wiser, yeah, yes, or at least you've dumped that vestigial junk in your mouth and know what I'm saying. That's right. We had the whole episode in the past on parts of our bodies that we've abandoned and no longer need, and yet they're still around, and then the question of well, have we really left them behind completely? Maybe they do have a purpose, just a purpose that we don't have to use as much

in modern times. So I was thinking about that a little bit though in the past few days I've been, especially with some of your pinkillers. Yeah, alright, so what are we talking about today? Today? We are talking about falling out of airplanes. Or falling in airplanes. Either way you want to look at it. What is your philosophy on this? You've flown, but what is it like? What goes through your mind when you're taking off, when you're landing, when you're up there? Are you afraid of falling in

the plane? You have a survival plan in mind? What's your dealing I don't really have a survival plan in mind, although after this podcast I know I will. But I think that everybody to some degree is very frightened of the proposition of crashing in a plane, right because a plane seems crazy to us at some level that we could be thirty thou feet in the air, supported by these wings that are just dealing with with the pressure of air that's forcing them upwards and keeping us afloat.

So my feeling is that everybody has had some level of anxiety, especially after you've ever experienced a really bad flight, or even just a somewhat bad flight. Yeah. I mean, on a basic level, we're going to a place where man does not belong and and we and and we know it. You're up really high, and if that plane were to plummet, and sometimes they do, there's a very good chance that it would kill us. True, and I mean again, you're hurling through the air in a metal capsule.

You have no control. What's no control. The control of the airplane is in the hands of people on the other side of often the locked door. You're told to set an appropriate place, You're told when to get up, when to set down, when you can go to the bathroom. And uh, you know, especially if you're a control freak, that can be a very intense situation. And adding some claustrophobia on top of that, and you've got quite a

stressful time in a well. And then you look at the chump next to you and you think, is this person we're going to help out? You know when the

everything hits the fan? Yeah, I don't know. Well, it's been my experience that in the past on flights, I'll be kind of concerned taking off where I'm like, oh, this could be this could be it, this could be the last flight, right, And then as I get going, if I am seated near annoying enough people, I'll end up focusing on that and by the end of the flight, I will be wishing that we would crash into the ocean.

So it is my irritation with with my fellow humans ends up exceeding my fear of death in the airplane. All right, Well, before we play into everybody's fears about falling and crashing, let's actually talk about how this is truly in irrational fear. Yes, okay, so despite the horror stories that we hear about plane crashes, that the real lesson here is that people will actually make it through

crashes more often than not. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, of passengers involved in plane crashes survived, the majority of airplane accidents involve only non fatal injuries and aircraft damage. Okay, so me, if you think about a flight taking off or landing, that's usually when you have

some sort of crash situation. So just everybody knows it's the rule of plus three minus eight plus the first three minutes in the last eight minutes of the flight, those are the times when you statistically have the greatest chance of something happening. Right, So, yes, that's probably what when people are most nervous. But you should know that

these flights are mostly survival. So let's also talk about flying versus driving, because this gives us a really good hold on what your chances are of perishing in one

of these two ways. For starters, I should mention that the number of successful flights worldwide and two thousand eleven alone thirty eight million, two point eight billion passengers that were flying safely in because the year alone, And that relates to the fact that I would use early on to I mean, I was never like super afraid of flying, but I would never go a little tense, and I would just remind myself, when is the last time I solntvd an entire basketball team was wiped out, or an

entire roster of a wrestling promotion, or people that fly on a regular basis and they're still flying and they've been flying on their whole lives. If crashing were really that huge for a possibility, it would just be like every year you'd see a basketball team just go down in flames. And so that's what you see here. An enormous number of people fly every day, and the vast

majority of them are not perishing. And then when you look at it compared to cars, all right, if you look at the total, we're looking at thirty four thousand, two hundred nine transportation fatalities in the US alone in two thousand and ten, we break those down, we have twelve thousand, four hundred and thirty five from passenger cars, pretty extensive, and then we have six hundred seventy two from boats recreational boats, and then only four hundred and

seventy two from all aviation. And I do think it's interesting to note to that in two thou eight, the US fatality rate was less than one per billion passenger trips, okay, and then if you compare that to the US road fatalities thirty five thousand and up, that's quite a difference, right, Yeah. The global accident rate for Western built planes actually improved in two thousand eleven, going from about one crash for every one point six Newigan flights to one crash for

every two point seven million flights. And those stats, by the way, are from this awesome infographic that house stuff Works created for a curiosity website. I think I've linked to it before on the Facebook page, and I'll help link to it again with the blog folks that accompanies of this podcast. So what we're seeing here is a manifestation of our psychological fears. Right. There's a good study that actually plays this out, and it's a study of

the impact of nine eleven on road fatalities. So in two thousand and five, Garrett Blaylock wanted to measure the psychological effects of fear flying with nine eleven. Of course is the context, since the public had suddenly shunned flying for fear of more unfolding terrorist plots. Yeah, everyone remembers, O this went down. Um, nine eleven occurred. You had these hijacked planes, you have these fatalities, and people got tense about flying. The flight industry got tense about people flying.

Everybody was tense, and so a lot of people ended up instead of taking that vacation that involved a flight, they scaled down and they decided to drive instead. So you have more people on the road. They're feeling safer, right because when's the last time the terrorist attacked occurred on a Honda. Yeah, but exactly. But it's possible, I suppose.

But this actually increased people's exposure to fatal crashes. Americans wound up suffering extra fatalities, and Laylock said that our findings reveal an additional two hundred forty two road fatalities per month for the period from October two thousand and one to December two thousand and one. Yeah, they calculated extra fatalities, which is more than died in the nine

eleven air crashes themselves, just the crashes, mind you. Right, So, okay, we've planned some stats that you guys, we're gonna take a break and we get back. We're going to talk about how to best survive a crash and free fall. All right, we're back, and I want to point out just to throw one more alarming and comforting stat If you're flying, one in five million. That's the approximate odds of dying in a plane crash in the United States. The odds of dying in a car crash one eight five.

If you're listening to this prior to your flight, are on your flight, breathe a sigh of relief. If you're driving home listening to this, look around you tighten up, very careful. Maybe turn off the podcast. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, okay, so you're up in the air. Let's talk about who, statists stickly is going to survive crash. Well, birds obviously not all birds, right, Well, driven quite a lot of

birds crashing with plane lailing. Yeah, insects, beings that are composed either of water, or have a less compact body

system going on, right, okay, all right? According to popuar Mechanics, their article how to Fallow feet and Survive by Dan Keppel says that statistically, it's best to be a flight crew member, a child, or traveling in a military aircraft, and that over the past four decades there have been at least a dozen commercial air lines crashes with just one survivor, and of those documented, four of the survivor's

were crew in seven more passengers under the age of eighteen. Now, for the crew members, it's easy enough to explain this, and they have better restraint systems. And as we'll talk in a little bit, if you were to survive a crash and say that the plane sort of just split in half and you were hurtling through the air, would be better to me in your seat. But I don't want to get into that quite yet. The big question

is why do children survive? And there's no consensus on this, but there is this idea that children under the age of four, especially under the age of four, have more flexible skeletons, more relaxed muscle tone. Us and we actually talked about exactly We talked about this concept before, um, I believe it was getting shocked or surviving lightning volts.

Lightning volts, lightning volts of coursing through your body. That if you happen to be picked up by a tornado or some other force and dumped on the ground, it would be better if you were kind of out if you've been hit. I think what the example was if you had been hit by say a lamp first, because if your body is relaxed, it's much more apt to actually deal with the shock of being put down by a tornado in another place anyway, Well, this often comes

up in discussions of drunk driving fatalities as well. Obviously that you have a situation where the drunk driver is more out of it and therefore they're less tents. Yeah, is the sober individual is more tense understandably when someone slams into them, and then the survival rate is sometimes better for the actual drunk driver in the scenario. So kids, they have more relaxed special turnus and so that's what

we're actually talking about here. And then a higher proportions subcutaneous fat which helps to protect internal organs, right, and then smaller people whose heads are lower than the seat backs in front of them are shielded more so short chebby children with a relaxed attitude about life. Yeah, meditating. Yeah no, I mean that's not actually funny to talk about, but um we can find humor in it. Yeah, well, I mean, you know we're talking about subject is a

serious subject. So that is why they think that those are the folks that tend to survive crashes. So it's good to be in a better restraint system or shrink yourself the safest place on the plane. Now, this have come up against different information on this. Popular Mechanics analyzed data from every commercial jet wreck in the United States from nineteen we went to two thousand and five, and they included that people sitting near the tail have a

higher chance of survival than those sitting in the front. Well, one of the classic examples will look at in a little bit was a tailgun and at the seventeen So yeah, yeah, And then there's other data that says if you are sitting about five seats from the exit doors, then you're in better shape. But some other people who say it was only in the case of a fire because the proximity of the door really gives you an advantage. Another good place the escape from New York Air Force one

escape pod. If you remember this from the movie No, I don't. Is this the Bruce willis No, No No. This is Kurt Russell and John Carpenter's epic. Oh yeah, Donald Pleasants played the president estrangely enough, British Donald Pleasants, and he climbed in it and it like falls out of the plane and bounces. There's another strategy. And then there's the Golden time. Yes, the Golden time, which isn't as happy and stress free as it sounds. But this

revers to the critical ninety seconds immediately following impact. So in a survival crash, obviously you have fatalities that a Kurblin aircraft hits the ground, But then after the plane to sit the ground, what happens hasardous chemicals are released, Things begin to set fire, things start to get out of control. So you have about ninety seconds after you

hit the ground where you need to flee the vessel. Yeah, And I think that this is particularly important in takeoff and landing crashes, right because these are when they have the whole slides and everything that the inflatable slides, because the whole idea is something's gone wrong, and even if it's just a matter of the plane getting whacked up a bit or doing a very rough valley landing, we need to get everyone away from it because the vessel

is potentially compromised at this point, right, So those ninety seconds are your chance to calm yourself and try to think rationally and logically. Those are the people who tend to survive more if they can harness that and not panic and freak out. Another thing I wanted to point out to is that, according to the f f A, using the brace position is three times safer than sitting

upright in a crash. So there actually is a point to the whole the brace you know that can cover exactly So just in case you thought that was something that was created to make you feel better about the flight, like know, sort of like they say, oh, you've got your floating cushion underneath, and sometimes I think, really, such a psychological you know that actually is helpful as well

as the floating cushion. So let's say you are falling, either the plane has split open and you're you've been thrown free of it, or miraculously you've managed to work your way to an exit and throwing yourself out of the plane. Now you're just you're falling, bon are you at this point? Well, gravity is pulling you towards Earth and you're going faster. Right, Let's talk about it in

that perspective. And like any moving object, you create drag more as your speed increases, and when downward forced equals upward resistance, acceleration stops and you max out. And the popular mechanics article put that max about usually like the

average about a hundred twenty miles per hour. So right now you know that unless you can create more drag and you can slow down a bit, you're probably going to make impact at one per hour on something, right, Yeah, the terminal velocity things really interesting in terms of survival falls. Radio Lab did an episode a couple of years back now about falling and they had a segment that dealt with the reality of cats falling out of high rise

windows in New York City, which they do. You know, cats, they are locked up inside and they all have that intense call of the wild and well, yeah, nine lives and they desperately want to get outside and eat some grass and puke and eat some birds and puke a little more and lay in the dust and roll around

it and all that stuff. So inevitably somebody opens a window leaves it cracked or something, and the cat will go out, get a little over excited and plummet and in this particular radio but they talked about how there's like a lower level range. Of course, cats are very agile and they're good at surviving falls from low level, so certain lower stories on building everything is good. Then there's a mid range where the cat is pretty much

boned because it's going to be a lethal fall. But then there's an upper level where suddenly survivalism kicks back in a again. And it has to do with terminal velocity. The argument here is in these scenarios, cats fell far enough that they achieved terminal velocity and they were spread out and then they were able to manage their fall successfully. It's kind of the argument here. Well, and then that's interesting.

You say that there's a stat from the Geneva based Aircraft Crashes Record Office and they say that about a hundred and eighteen thousand people have died in more than fifteen thousand plane crashes between nine and eight okay, Uh, confirmed or plausible accounts of lift to tell about incidents is only a hundred fifty seven and of those hundred fifty seven, only forty two occurring at heights over ten

thousand feet. So to your point, the higher up obviously, the more of a drop in, the more terminal velocity you talked about managing the fall. Yes, this is a really interesting concept. Well. First of all, as the Popular Mechanics article points out, one thing you can do is if you see a piece of the plane floating, they're falling with you rather not floating. Uh. If you can wedge yourself in there, you might have an increased chance of survival. Right. The more debris that you can kind

of land on top of, the better, right. Nine seventy two Serbian flight attendant by the name of Vestna Bolivick, she was in a d C nine over Czechoslovakia, blows up. She ends up following thirty three thousand feet which between her seat and a catering trolley in the section of the aircraft, and she ends up surviving. So it's severely injured but survives thirty three thousand foot drop. There's actually

a term for this called wreckage. Writing writing. Yeah, so if you can kind of gather yourself around that debris, the better, and thirty three thousand feet is that is incredible. Of course, she sustained some serious injuries, but she lived to tell about it. There's another person named Julianne Copecki. On Christmas Eve nineteen seventy one, she was on the airplane and it was traveling over the Amazon when it exploded and she woke up on the jungle floor. She

was strapped into her seat. Again, this is important. That seat helped, you know, with her fall. In terms of christening her fall. She was surrounded by falling holiday gifts. She remembered advice from her father, a biologist that because she obviously she was like, I'm very hurt here, but I have survived it, and she sort of just compartmentalized. She remembered the advice from her father, which was to find civilization. When lost in the jungle, you should follow water.

So she's got a broken collar bone, she's got maggot filled injuries, right, and she's wading through all of these streams until she gets to bigger and bigger bodies of water, and then finally she finds a canoe. It takes her like forever to get in the canoe because again she's injured. And she gets to the banks where she finds some lumberjacks and it takes two hours to scale this hill. Before she can they finally see her. But again this

is this is really interesting survival information. That is best to leave the plane crash if possible, because that's really gonna up your chances of survival. But before you can leave the plane crash, of course, you have to hit the ground. Yes, it's unavoidable. The fall is one thing, but it's that sudden stop at the end. There was the Kids in the Hall sketch back in the day where an individual has a parachute on and they're doing skydiving and the first person jumps out is his shoe

doesn't open and he splats on the ground. The second one does it splats on the ground. I think it's the third two. And the whole time there's a guy back in the line and he's doing running the stats in his head. He's like, what are the chances of one person dying during a sky dive And he's calculating those odds and what are the chances of too what

are the chances of three? And then he finally convinces himself that his best odds are to jump out without a shoot and to hit the ground running that if he's running fast enough in mid air, he'll survive. Um, that is not one of the tactics that we ran across. But there are basically two schools of thought. First of all, you want to be like that cat. You want to be like that skydiver here in the fall. You want

to spread out so that you can you can flying squirrel. Yeah, yeah, so you can achieve terminal velocity well, and because you're slowing yourself down a bit and you're able to maneuver a little while. Yeah. And of course here's the thing though, once you impact is eminent, you got to change your body position because that would obviously result in this flat right there. According to studying the Journal War Medicine, they would argue for staying more or less in this position.

They're saying wide body impact is ideal, which makes a certain amount of sense. I mean, it's kind of like if you're on thin ice, you want to spread out right, you know, down. But then in nineteen sixty three report by the Federal Aviation Agency argued that shifting into the classic skydiverse landing stance feed together heels up, flex knees and hips was the best to increase survivability because I really see the other one as being sort of a

vehicle for splatness. And then there's this idea of landing in water, which perferably you should not. Yeah, perferably you shouldn't because ultimately, landing quote unquote in water is going to be like landing quote unquote in concrete. The concrete is not going to give. There's gonna be no bounce to that. Well, there's gonna be some bounce, but it's not gonna be the concrete. It's gonna be doing it likewise,

hitting water to high speed. You've ever done a belly flop into a pool, imagine that from thirty feet it's gonna be like it in concrete. You're gonna bust apart on it. And then those pieces are gonna sink, but only after you've made impact unless you position yourself like a pencil. Right, And again, it's not attet that you're

free falling this. You hit it after a thousand feet. Yeah, there's this idea of the knife like entry, right, Okay, so I guess you can think of yourself as sort of like just dipping in with your feet as flexed as possible. For your flex and for God's sake, clinch your button. They do say this. They say this, They say for obvious reasons, not joking around here, clench your buttocks if you're going in in that direction. And they do talk a bit about divers. In of Poco cliff divers,

they do a position where they go head first. They're jumping off cliffs, not airplanes, right, obviously, lock their fingers and only their fingers, hold that above their head, and do so in a way that protects they had because

that's the big thing. Your head is obviously a very essential part of your anatomy, and if it's hitting the water anywhere near first, it's gonna need protection, even though nobody wants to take it right in the face, because you know, obviously that's the money maker if you had to choose better, the front of the face in the back of the head, right, right, So just don't worry about vanity. If you had to, that's what you would

want to expose that part of your head. Right now, most of the world is water, so there's a good chance you won't have any choice but to land in water. But if you're over land, your options are a little different. Obviously, you don't want to aim for the concrete. That would be bad. A big, giant, fluffy pile of cotton would be ideal. Yes, something that's gonna give this gonna cushion the fall. But amazingly enough, things like a glass roof can actually help. All right, Right, this is a World

War two right, Yeah, this is a man. We mentioned the B seventeen earlier. The seventeen was a plastic American bomber from World War two, beautiful aircraft. This guy was the tail gunner Alan McGhee. His B sevent team was blown up in a nine mission over France. He survived a twenty foot crash into a train station through a glass glass roof, and then he was subsequently captured by

German troops. But that's amazing you under arrest, and if you're gonna be captured by the German straining World War two, better that you're in aviation dude, because they did receive better treatment. Obviously, this guy probably got a few slaps on the back from these guys in a couple more ribs. But the thing is he fell through the glass, and even though nobody wants to fall through a pane of glass,

it does cushion the fall a little bit. It slows you down a little before you hit the stone underneath, and he eventually hits you know, concrete or stones. You see a similar thing, oddly enough, in pro wrestling, wherein some of the matches that involve people falling, they'll fall through tables. And I'm sure a lot of you have seen this where they'll have like a folding table set

up at ringside. Somebody will fall off the top of the turnbuckle and they'll go through the table and then hit the concrete floor, and the crowd tends to go wild because it makes this awesome noise and you see wood breaking and it looks like a train wreck, and then it's awesome in its own way, and it's perfectly realist. Well, nothing has been messed away. Sometimes the tables have been

pre cut to facilitated better fall. But it's weird because in the US, anyone living in the US knows what kind of tables we're dealing with, These big folding tables like you have it like a I don't know, like a church. Yeah, I was gonna say, like a basement church, basement church, food orally or in the school cafeteria. Second of thing. In Japan, they don't seem to have those. The Japanese version of a folding table is a much more torturous looking, smaller, slimmer table, So in Japan, when

someone falls to the table, they go through those. But in either case, even though it seems more devastating and it's more dramatic, it's actually better for the person who is falling off of that turnbuckle or whatever it is helping to cushion their fall before that, ye, same principle, before they hit that concrete. And incidentally, one of the articles we were looking at did point out that wrestlers and acrobats have a better chance of surviving a plane crash.

That was that the one from the sixties. Yeah, And they were saying something like, if you practice martial arts that you could apply some I guess some of the psychology of it to your plane crash, which I suppose, but I don't know. The karate chop the air. So obviously aim for something if you can, if you have any choice, and you can position yourself to do so, aim towards something softer, be that grass ground that's great,

swamp even better, a stacked pillow factory. Pine trees not so much kind of like they can slow you down, but they can also impale you. Okay, So this is what we know so far about what's happening during a crash. But pretty soon we may have an actual better idea of actual principles at hand. And the reason is because on equal this year, two twelve of Boeing seven seven was deliberately crash landed in a remote and uninhabited Mexican desert.

On board were cameras and crash test dummies that were used for the experiment, and this was pulled off for a documentary by Discovery Channel and Channel four. And this documentary is due to be aired later this year and should really give us actually some insight into what go going on during a fatal crash. I'll just mention to you it's filled with crashed on these not not any um,

no actual discovery or TLC talent. I don't no, no, I hope we haven't had interfears too much and we actually give you some good information on free falling and what that's like. And actually, with the chances are that you would be involved in a fatal crash, I should add that in my own experiences with flying, and again, I never suffered from anything even resembling like crippling fear

of flying. You got to where I would look at it from a point of view like, all right, it is out of my control what happens, and and if I crash and die, then well that's going to happen. And the best thing that I can do given that slight chance, is to realize, hey, I've had a good run so far. Or if I'm traveling with my wife, I'll remind myself I'm with the person that means the most to me. So you know, mnfol just told her

hand and see what happens, which is good device. But you should know that for twenty of the public, they actually suffer from fear of flying, a phobia. And so it's very hard to say like I'm gonna step on this plane, I'm gonna go on vacation, and I'm going to face the possibility of my impending mortality. Yeah, but again, if you die, all right, so well, I mean it's

gonna happen. Death is one of those things. Sure it's something to be afraid up, but everybody does it, so it can be that much thing to everybody's doing it. Everybody's going to do it eventually, and if you go out in a plane crash, it's at least gonna be um substantial. I don't know, all right, Okay, Well on that note, Well, my mouth is growing tired, so I'm only going to read one quick listener mail, but I promise we'll catch up on some of the awesome stuff

that we're hearing from other folks in future episodes. Here's one from Matthew, and Matthew writes in in regards to contact lenses of the Gods, I was immediately cast into whirlwind of imagery revolving around the traditional assembly line workers and their transition from assembly to control of machinery that assembols. This led to the thought of our current medical system and the idea of our medical schools requiring its applicants

to be intelligent in the future. My mind pictures hospitals in the nature of an assembly line, with a host of unskilled labors making sure that the machines are functional and occasionally troubleshoot the aspect of the current educational system crumbling in the phase of technology. I feel that until we are able to perfect AI, there will always be the need for those who can retain and develop new knowledge. Cyborg does a definition I believe will start drifting to

that of robots becoming more human. I believe that his technology develops, humans will trend away from machinery and resort to biomechanical and then eventually the regrowth of appendages and tissue, which we currently replace with tool of objects. So there you go. I love it when podcast stars people's minds regarding the future of our civilization. Indeed, all right, my cyborg friend, where can people find us? If you're on Facebook, you can find us at stuff to Blow your Mind.

You can do a search on that end that will take you right to us. And if you're on Twitter, you can find us via the handle below the mind one word, and you can also drop us a line at Blow of the Mind at Discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff works dot com.