Speaker 1: Hey, you Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time for a Vault episode. This episode originally aired on
Speaker 1: August nineteen, and it was called How to Survive a
Speaker 1: Great Fall, where we became suddenly obsessed with the question
Speaker 1: of what happens if you fall from like airplane altitude?
Speaker 1: That's right. Uh this one, this one is a really
Speaker 1: fun one gets into, you know, the physics and also
Speaker 1: some just amazing stories of human survival. Totally. Let's skydive
Speaker 1: right in. Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And Robert, I know
Speaker 1: you've got a love for older aircraft, so I wanted
Speaker 1: to start off talking today about an aircraft. I think
Speaker 1: I know you've mentioned it before. I think you've got
Speaker 1: a spot in your heart for it. It's the B
Speaker 1: seventeen Flying Fortress. Oh of course. Yeah. So this was
Speaker 1: a gigantic four engine heavy bomber developed by Boeing that
Speaker 1: was used by the United States in World War Two,
Speaker 1: primarily for long range, high altitude bombing raids against Germany
Speaker 1: and Nazi occupied targets in Europe, and to a lesser
Speaker 1: extent it was used some in the Pacific theater. Oh.
Speaker 1: And I guess, just to clarify what I said a
Speaker 1: minute ago, I mean when I say you've got a
Speaker 1: spot in your heart for this, I don't mean like
Speaker 1: you love war and bombing. And I mean that like
Speaker 1: I know that you have a kind of love for
Speaker 1: the aesthetics of airplane design. Yeah. I mean my my
Speaker 1: dad was a War War two buff and he and
Speaker 1: more importantly he was he was really into creating, to
Speaker 1: working on scale model kits, yeah, and mostly War War
Speaker 1: two scale models. And so the B seventeen uh was
Speaker 1: certainly a plane that was one of his favorites. And
Speaker 1: you know, he was always telling me about it, and
Speaker 1: he had like a prized model of it, like probably
Speaker 1: like you know, his the masterpiece of his his scale
Speaker 1: modeling time. Uh and uh And say, I grew up
Speaker 1: amid these depictions of the B seventeen. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: it's a very iconic plane. Um. And it's the third
Speaker 1: most produced bomber of all time. It was an icon
Speaker 1: of US air superiority and uh, and it's a highly
Speaker 1: successful design and they were used for various post war
Speaker 1: purposes as well. And there's actually there's somewhere in the
Speaker 1: neighborhood of like I want to say, ten B seventeens
Speaker 1: that are actually still airworthy. Oh yeah, I think I
Speaker 1: was reading that there are like some that are actually
Speaker 1: still in flight somewhere. Well, they're kept, you know, in
Speaker 1: in an air worthy condition. And it's harder to keep
Speaker 1: an older plane like this in air worthy condition. But
Speaker 1: but with a plane that where the design is solid
Speaker 1: and it has this iconic status in uh, you know,
Speaker 1: in American aviation history, you're going to to to to
Speaker 1: keep those going as long as you can. And even
Speaker 1: the ones that aren't air worthy, there are a number
Speaker 1: of just fantastically restored um B seventeens in museums a
Speaker 1: v A museums around the world. Yeah. Uh. And it's
Speaker 1: so it was a strategically important aircraft, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: so it was this heavily armored aircraft that was played
Speaker 1: a huge role in in Allied victory in Europe, and
Speaker 1: it was it was sort of famous for like taking
Speaker 1: a beating in the course of its mission before returning
Speaker 1: to base intact and landing with lots of visible combat damage. Right,
Speaker 1: And I guess this is tied up in the idea
Speaker 1: of that that it's called the flying fortress. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: then again we don't want to romanticize the this weapon
Speaker 1: of war too much. It was used to kill a
Speaker 1: lot of people, of course, and a lot of people
Speaker 1: died flying them. But just from a purely designed standpoint,
Speaker 1: it is fascinating because there they were. They really was
Speaker 1: this flying fortress. It's this idea that you you have this,
Speaker 1: this vessel, this uh, this this airplane you're sitting up
Speaker 1: into the sky, sitting it into into into enemy territory
Speaker 1: to rain bombs down on them, and then you want
Speaker 1: to have it protected. So of course, the main thing
Speaker 1: you can do is have if you have fighter planes
Speaker 1: to accompany it, faster, subtle uh death machines that can
Speaker 1: fly about and pick off things that are trying to
Speaker 1: interfere with the bombing fleet. But on top of that,
Speaker 1: you need to have some guns on that flying fortress
Speaker 1: on your bomber to protect it. But since the bomber
Speaker 1: itself is not going to be like super maneuverable, especially
Speaker 1: compared to fighters that are coming up to intercept it.
Speaker 1: What you need to do is you need to have
Speaker 1: all your directions covered. You have some machine guns poking
Speaker 1: out the front, you have tailgunner in the back, you
Speaker 1: have a turret on the top, uh, side gunners, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But one of the defense features of the B seventeen
Speaker 1: what you're getting to is now famous, or maybe more
Speaker 1: importantly infamous. It's the ball turret that the lower turret,
Speaker 1: that is this pair of manned machine guns inside a
Speaker 1: plexiglass dome or ball on the bottom of the aircraft. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I'm sure it looked science fiction e at the time,
Speaker 1: and it still looks science fiction and when you see
Speaker 1: it now if you're if you're not expecting it. Uh So,
Speaker 1: this is the Sperry ball turret. And it was only
Speaker 1: introduced in the in the B seventeen E series, but
Speaker 1: it was included on in all subsequent series of the
Speaker 1: B seventeen bomber. It was also deployed in the B
Speaker 1: twenty four Liberator, which is another heavy bomber, and then
Speaker 1: a couple of a couple of other planes. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it was super small, so small that you typically had
Speaker 1: to pinpoint a particularly small adult airmen to go into
Speaker 1: the ball, and then on top of it, was in
Speaker 1: a comfy uh not comfy, the exact opposite of comfy, cozy,
Speaker 1: snug tight yeah. In fact, he is essentially in a
Speaker 1: fetal position the whole time. Only instead of of having
Speaker 1: all of the warmth and safety that you know comes
Speaker 1: with the idea of returning to the womb, you are not.
Speaker 1: You are not in the womb in the ball turret.
Speaker 1: You're not even in the middle of the plane. You're
Speaker 1: you're beneath the plane. You're sort of halfway hanging out
Speaker 1: underneath the that this this bomber exposed to any interceptor
Speaker 1: aircraft that are flying up underneath, and hopefully you're gonna
Speaker 1: be able to do something about it with your machine guns.
Speaker 1: And something goes wrong, well, the bad news is there's
Speaker 1: there's not actually room in the ball for you to
Speaker 1: wear your parachute. Uh. In some cases they would leave
Speaker 1: the parachute uh just above them in the main fuselage,
Speaker 1: or if there was room, you might bring it in
Speaker 1: strapped your chest. That's gonna come back in just a minute.
Speaker 1: So I've thought about the ball to it a lot,
Speaker 1: Not because I I know nearly as much about about
Speaker 1: older aircraft as you, Robert, but because specifically because of
Speaker 1: a poem that I read for the first time many
Speaker 1: years ago. That it's just a five line poem by
Speaker 1: the American poet Randall Jarrell called the Death of the
Speaker 1: Ball Turret Gunner. It was written in n about his
Speaker 1: World War Two experience, and it captures this, uh, this
Speaker 1: sort of cramped terror. Here. It goes from my mother's sleep.
Speaker 1: I fell into the state and I hunched in its
Speaker 1: belly to all my wet fur froze six miles from earth,
Speaker 1: loosed from its dream of life. I woke to black
Speaker 1: flak and the Nightmare fighters. When I died, they washed
Speaker 1: me out of the turret with a hose. Oh man,
Speaker 1: that is rough. I don't think i've heard that before. Um,
Speaker 1: I should throw in like a couple of things. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, the turret does like rotate and move around.
Speaker 1: It's like a little carnival ride underneath the plane. So
Speaker 1: you can aim right, Yeah, you need more degrees of
Speaker 1: freedom to chase the moving targets that are coming at
Speaker 1: you from below. Right, And and on top of that,
Speaker 1: I cannot begin to imagine how terrifying it really was.
Speaker 1: Like I get a little anxious when I fly in general,
Speaker 1: and to imagine myself like slung below this uh this
Speaker 1: you know, rattling warplane crammed into a clear ball, the
Speaker 1: bottom just exposed. And then if you have like you know,
Speaker 1: all these uh you know, all the chaos of war,
Speaker 1: the explosions happening all around you. Um. I recently watched
Speaker 1: Hulse adaptation of Catch twin two, which is different aircraft,
Speaker 1: um and no ball to it, but it does a
Speaker 1: great job of just showing, uh, you know, immersing you
Speaker 1: in this idea of just how terrifying a bomber run was.
Speaker 1: Even in Catch twenty two, they're not even dealing with
Speaker 1: interceptor craft. They're just dealing with anti aircraft fire, and
Speaker 1: it's they just do a wonderful job of just making
Speaker 1: you feel the sheer terror of the characters flying into
Speaker 1: battle without you know, a bunch of heroic nonsense, you know,
Speaker 1: label ladled on top of it. Because ultimately that's what
Speaker 1: Catched twenty two is about, dispelling the hero myth with
Speaker 1: a healthy dose of absurdity. Yeah, well, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about one of those terrifying experiences and use that
Speaker 1: to connect to the subject of the rest of today's episode. So, uh,
Speaker 1: let's look at the story of one particular bald her
Speaker 1: at gunner during World War Two. He was an American
Speaker 1: staff sergeant named Alan either Magey or McGee mg e E.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna call him McGee for the rest of the
Speaker 1: episode here. So, in January of nineteen forty three, staff
Speaker 1: Sergeant McGee was manning the turret of a B seventeen
Speaker 1: that had been nicknamed snap crackle pop. Uh. Don't know
Speaker 1: what that comes from, but I have to imagine it's
Speaker 1: from probably bullets hitting the plane. I don't know, but
Speaker 1: that's my guess. So the plane was on a bombing
Speaker 1: run over an area of Nazi occupied France when it
Speaker 1: suddenly took heavy fire from German fighters and it began
Speaker 1: to break apart in the air at about twenty thousand
Speaker 1: feet or about six thousand seven meters up and in
Speaker 1: the chaos as the airplane was coming apart in the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: McGee managed to escape his ball turret and jump out
Speaker 1: of the falling and separating plane parts. But he didn't
Speaker 1: have a parachute. He had not been wearing one probably
Speaker 1: because he couldn't fit in the ball with it on,
Speaker 1: so he's outside the plane falling at twenty feet. So
Speaker 1: you would think, obviously this is just certain death, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there just would be no you survive, You're just you're
Speaker 1: just dead in the air, basically, Yeah, falling without a
Speaker 1: parachute for twenty feet, which is about six point one
Speaker 1: kilometers in altitude, there's no way to survive that. But
Speaker 1: strangely McGhee didn't die. He lost consciousness during the fall,
Speaker 1: probably due to a lack of oxygen, right because up
Speaker 1: at that atmosphere, the up that altitude, the atmosphere is thinner.
Speaker 1: You can't get enough oxygen, so you pass out. But
Speaker 1: then he woke up. He woke up hours later on
Speaker 1: the ground to find himself a prisoner of war being
Speaker 1: treated by German medics, and he had a few broken
Speaker 1: bones and he had cuts all over his body, but
Speaker 1: he was alive. Apparently the way McGhee survived had to
Speaker 1: do with how he landed. Instead of hitting the ground,
Speaker 1: McGhee had just by luck, crashed through a glass ceiling
Speaker 1: in a train station at St. Nazaire, and the impact
Speaker 1: of crashing through the glass must have slowed his fall
Speaker 1: enough that he was not killed when he hit the
Speaker 1: floor below. And so as unbelievable as this story is,
Speaker 1: McGee is not the only one. There are actually lots
Speaker 1: of interesting, fascinating, long false survival stories in which people fall,
Speaker 1: you know, what would normally be absolutely lethal distances without
Speaker 1: a parachute, but somehow managed to survive in one way
Speaker 1: or another. And that's what we wanted to talk about today,
Speaker 1: and and it should we should drive home like we're
Speaker 1: dealing We're dealing with distances here that are almost this
Speaker 1: seems almost absolutely lethal and you certainly do not have
Speaker 1: to fall far at all to suffer a fatal injury.
Speaker 1: Oh no, you can easily die from a ten or
Speaker 1: twenty foot fall. But that they're falling from ten thousand,
Speaker 1: twenty thousand feet, it just seems astounding. It seems unreal
Speaker 1: Like to survive such a fall, you would just have
Speaker 1: to become just instantly hyper religious, right, you just have
Speaker 1: to assume angels appeared and uh and took your unconscious
Speaker 1: body down to the earth. Well, a lot of people
Speaker 1: do kind of go to those miraculous X nations, but
Speaker 1: it turns out that there are some pretty consistent, not
Speaker 1: totally consistent, but there are some common physical characteristics of
Speaker 1: the types of falls that people survive from. It has
Speaker 1: to do with how you fall, how you land, where
Speaker 1: you land, and so that's what we wanted to explore
Speaker 1: for the rest of the day. Now, one thing that's
Speaker 1: funny is that, like, it seems like falling out of
Speaker 1: an airplane must be so much worse than just say,
Speaker 1: falling off of a really tall building or something, but
Speaker 1: in fact that's not the case. If if you are
Speaker 1: falling long enough to achieve what's called terminal velocity. Will
Speaker 1: explain more about that in a bit. It's a speed
Speaker 1: that's not a not a constant, but it's going to
Speaker 1: vary depending on who you are, what you're what you weigh,
Speaker 1: what you're shaped like, what you're wearing, you know how,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. As long as you fall
Speaker 1: far enough to achieve that, and that might just be
Speaker 1: you know, a few hundred meters, then you then you're
Speaker 1: basically falling as fast as you're gonna fall, And actually
Speaker 1: falling from an airplane isn't any worse and in some
Speaker 1: crazy ways could actually be better. Uh So, but anyway, well,
Speaker 1: we'll come back to all that, I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about a few other known cases from history. So one
Speaker 1: case of somebody who fell out of an airplane and
Speaker 1: survived is Christine Mackenzie. She didn't actually fall out of
Speaker 1: an airplane. She jumped. She's an experienced South African skydiver
Speaker 1: who had already jumped more than a hundred times when
Speaker 1: both her main parachute and her backup parachute failed on
Speaker 1: the same freefall in August two thousand four, So she
Speaker 1: fell about eleven thousand feet and survived by instead of
Speaker 1: hitting the ground directly, she first hit some suspended power
Speaker 1: lines before impact, and sort of like the glass ceiling
Speaker 1: in McGee's fall, the tension of the power lines is
Speaker 1: thought to have absorbed a lot of the energy of
Speaker 1: her fall and slowed her down in the process, so
Speaker 1: that when she finally hit the ground, she ended up
Speaker 1: with only a broken pelvis. Her fall lasted about forty
Speaker 1: five seconds. So let's let's entertain belief in guardian angels
Speaker 1: again for a second. Can you imagine the sort of
Speaker 1: scenario where you're falling and then the angel appears and says, look,
Speaker 1: I know this looks bad, but don't worry you're headed
Speaker 1: towards some high tension wires. Everything's gonna be fine. I
Speaker 1: just assume I would be. I would assume I would
Speaker 1: be torn in half. You know, Uh well, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm sure, I'm sure. It depends on like how you
Speaker 1: hit them. And another name, This one comes up a lot.
Speaker 1: It's a very famous case. This is Vesna Volkovich. Some
Speaker 1: of the details of the Volovich case have been disputed.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get into those whole disputes. I'm
Speaker 1: just going to talk about the version that's most often reported. So.
Speaker 1: Vesna Volovich was a Serbian flight attendant on a DC
Speaker 1: nine that was in the air over the Czech Republic
Speaker 1: in nineteen two when the cabin exploded, probably due to
Speaker 1: a bomb from a terrorism attack. She fell more than
Speaker 1: ten thousand one or more than thirty three thousand feet
Speaker 1: without a parachute, and she suffered severe injuries and broken
Speaker 1: bones and was in a coma for weeks. But she survived,
Speaker 1: and the question is how well. Her survival is usually
Speaker 1: attributed to the fact that while most of the rest
Speaker 1: of the passengers were blown out of the cabin when
Speaker 1: the fuselage broke apart, Volkovich was pinned inside by a
Speaker 1: food card and possibly by another member of the crew
Speaker 1: or a passenger, and so she stuck inside the fuselage.
Speaker 1: And then the broken part of the fuselage in which
Speaker 1: she was stuck just happened to land on a snowy
Speaker 1: tree covered hillside, and it's believed that the trees and
Speaker 1: the snow cushioned the impact. After she woke up, she
Speaker 1: had no memory of the crash, and she lived until
Speaker 1: six She's often cited as the record holder for the
Speaker 1: survivor of the longest fall without a parachute. Wow. That
Speaker 1: that is incredible. And and also I just want to
Speaker 1: apologize to any other nervous flyers out there who are
Speaker 1: listening to this. Hopefully you're not listening to this at
Speaker 1: the airport. Oh maybe we should have warned you now,
Speaker 1: you know, if you if you weren't aware by now,
Speaker 1: if you didn't pause the episode by now, then I
Speaker 1: guess maybe you you do need this episode to make
Speaker 1: it through your flight. Well, I'm sure you've heard it
Speaker 1: a million times before and it probably doesn't help with
Speaker 1: your fear, but it is a fact that flying is
Speaker 1: extremely safe. Commercial flying these days is extremely safe. Yes,
Speaker 1: if you know, if you are on a commercial jet
Speaker 1: with like an accredited pilot and all that. Like your
Speaker 1: your chances of having something bad happen are extremely low.
Speaker 1: So stick that in the logical side of your brain.
Speaker 1: It's probably already arguing with the logical side that is
Speaker 1: the whole reason you have the nerves. Anyway, let's go
Speaker 1: with one more example here. This is a survival story
Speaker 1: of Julien Kepki now Julienne Diller. She's a German woman
Speaker 1: or is a German woman who as a teenager survived
Speaker 1: a plane crash in the Amazon in ninety one from
Speaker 1: an altitude of over three kilometers after a plane was
Speaker 1: struck by lightning. She was the lone survivor of the crab.
Speaker 1: And then she not only survived the crash from from
Speaker 1: over three kilometers of altitude. After that she had to
Speaker 1: navigate her way through the rainforest to find help with
Speaker 1: no supplies except basically a bag of candy, oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: And after searching for ten days she found help from
Speaker 1: a group of loggers and was taken back to civilization
Speaker 1: for medical treatment. And she's still alive today. So at
Speaker 1: this point you're probably wondering, well, well, how casting the
Speaker 1: angels aside, what are the what are the logical, real
Speaker 1: life scientific answers? Uh, you know behind these survival stories
Speaker 1: where we're gonna take a break and when we come
Speaker 1: back we will discuss just that. All right, we're back.
Speaker 1: So Robert, you want to look at the physics of
Speaker 1: falling from a great height. Let's do it. Okay, So
Speaker 1: falling from a great height can kill you in a
Speaker 1: number of ways. I mean, just not to get too graphic,
Speaker 1: but one problem would be like what if you fall
Speaker 1: on a spike or something. You know, they're all these
Speaker 1: sort of like specific cases of what can happen to
Speaker 1: you when hit the ground. But that's the key, right right,
Speaker 1: the fall itself. I mean, that's that's easy enough to do.
Speaker 1: Um And surviving the fall is one thing. It's surviving
Speaker 1: the impact that is the problem, right, I mean, no
Speaker 1: matter where you land, the main problem that that you're
Speaker 1: going to encounter is going to be the difference between
Speaker 1: how fast you were falling and how suddenly you stop.
Speaker 1: Uh So, what happens when you fall from an incredible altitude? Well,
Speaker 1: we know there is gravity, right, There's an attraction between
Speaker 1: the Earth and your body due to gravity, and gravity
Speaker 1: accelerates you relentlessly towards the center of the Earth, not
Speaker 1: just when you're falling, but even right now, no matter
Speaker 1: where you are, gravity is relentlessly accelerating you towards the
Speaker 1: center of the Earth, and you will continue to accelerate
Speaker 1: towards the center of the Earth until something like the ground,
Speaker 1: or water or the air provides a compensating resistance to
Speaker 1: stop you from from going faster towards the center of
Speaker 1: the Earth. So that's probably the ground that's doing that
Speaker 1: to you right now. Yeah. I recently was thinking a
Speaker 1: bit about this when I was jumping off of a
Speaker 1: high dive. Um, and I had been a long time
Speaker 1: since I jumped off a high dive, but I was
Speaker 1: just really struck by just the feeling of of of
Speaker 1: being wanted by gravity. Like you you really you really
Speaker 1: feel it, uh, you know, more so than off of
Speaker 1: just a normal board. You feel yourself accelerating. You feel yourself,
Speaker 1: you know, pulled down with dramatic speed toward the surface
Speaker 1: of the water. Well, yeah, it's kind of weird to
Speaker 1: think about, but the force of gravity and the force
Speaker 1: of acceleration feel exactly the same to us. They are indistinguishable.
Speaker 1: They act the same way on our bodies. This is
Speaker 1: why you can use acceleration to provide artificial gravity and space.
Speaker 1: Right just by like continuously accelerating a capsule or providing
Speaker 1: angular momentum acceleration and a circular pattern, you can pretty
Speaker 1: much perfectly simulate what gravity is like. So if you're
Speaker 1: on or near the Earth surface, you are sort of
Speaker 1: permanently on an invisible train that wants to begin accelerating
Speaker 1: straight down at nine point eight meters per second per second,
Speaker 1: and we'll just keep going nine point eight meters per
Speaker 1: second faster every second, and it's always going to start
Speaker 1: chugging unless there's something pushing you back, pushing you to
Speaker 1: hold you in place. Now, there's one physics fact we
Speaker 1: all i think learned in school, which can be kind
Speaker 1: of confusing here, So we need to make a sort
Speaker 1: of obvious but important distinction. The acceleration due to gravity
Speaker 1: is the same for all falling objects near Earth's surface.
Speaker 1: That's nine point eight meters per second per second, no
Speaker 1: matter what you are, what kind of object you're talking about.
Speaker 1: But that does not mean that all objects fall at
Speaker 1: the same rate. This is obvious because of the effects
Speaker 1: of drag caused by air resistance acting on the falling object.
Speaker 1: So this is pretty obvious. When you drop a feather
Speaker 1: and a hammer side by side, obviously the hammer hits
Speaker 1: the ground first, unless say you're on the Moon where
Speaker 1: there is no atmosphere. And this is actually a demonstration
Speaker 1: that was put on during a moonwalk by the American
Speaker 1: astronaut David Scott in they were out on the Have
Speaker 1: you seen the video of this, Robert, I have, yes, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's impressive. There also have been some recent videos
Speaker 1: that that have been put together using a vacuum chamber,
Speaker 1: but they're also just as Uh. It is fascinating to
Speaker 1: watch because it seems it defies expectations because our expectations
Speaker 1: are based on a world of atmosphere exactly right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the and the vacuum chamber and on earth works
Speaker 1: just as good because it's nothing about the gravitational properties
Speaker 1: of the Moon that make the feather fall just as
Speaker 1: fast as the hammer. It's the fact, like you say,
Speaker 1: that there is no atmosphere to push up against it, uh,
Speaker 1: not no air to slow down the feather. By the
Speaker 1: way I I looked it up, it was a falcon feather. Huh.
Speaker 1: I wonder without knowing the answer, if if there was
Speaker 1: like a committee that decided that, where they're like, what
Speaker 1: kind of feather are we sending on the mission and
Speaker 1: someone's like, oh, it should be the turkey, and it
Speaker 1: should be it should be an American eagle. Uh just
Speaker 1: like in basically have the same conversation. They had a
Speaker 1: song about it the dove. Uh So, Anyway, if you're
Speaker 1: near Earth's surface and you're falling, gravity is going to
Speaker 1: keep accelerating you faster and faster until the drag of
Speaker 1: the atmosphere on your body, which we call air resistance,
Speaker 1: stops you from speeding up anymore. And there you level
Speaker 1: out at a top speed, and it's never gonna be
Speaker 1: an exactly perfect level top speed. You sort of approach
Speaker 1: a top speed and get within of it and then
Speaker 1: wobble up and down, and we call this terminal velocity. Now,
Speaker 1: exactly how fast terminal velocity is depends on a number
Speaker 1: of factors. It's the shape of the falling object. Like
Speaker 1: a one pound dart will fall faster than a one
Speaker 1: pound blanket, right because the blanket spreads out it catches
Speaker 1: the air. The weight of the falling object obviously heavier
Speaker 1: objects have more power to overcome the air resistance forces
Speaker 1: on them. The position or orientation of the following object.
Speaker 1: So imagine you drop a plate and you could drop
Speaker 1: it flat side down or you could drop it thin
Speaker 1: side down, and that's going to make a difference. Another
Speaker 1: thing is what medium the object is falling through and
Speaker 1: how dense the medium is. For example, you can fall
Speaker 1: faster higher in the atmosphere because the gas around you
Speaker 1: is thinner. This is something that these high altitude jumpers
Speaker 1: of experience, like Felix bomb Gardner, you know, went up
Speaker 1: super high in the atmosphere and jumped and was going
Speaker 1: faster earlier in the jump, but got slowed down as
Speaker 1: the atmosphere got thicker closer to the ground. So, based
Speaker 1: on all these kinds of factors, for an adult human
Speaker 1: falling through the atmosphere with no parachute, terminal velocity is
Speaker 1: going to vary a lot. Of A common figure I've
Speaker 1: seen cited for an adult human is that terminal velocity
Speaker 1: might be somewhere around a hundred kilometers per hour, which
Speaker 1: is about fifty four meters per second, or about a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty miles per hour. And this seems to
Speaker 1: be the case, maybe if you are trying to fall
Speaker 1: as slowly as possible, say in a belly flop position,
Speaker 1: which sort of turns your body into a bio parachute,
Speaker 1: right because you try to spread out and catch as
Speaker 1: much wind as possible. But I was reading an article
Speaker 1: by Frazer Kine at Universe Today, and he claimed that
Speaker 1: the skydivers who orient their body is like a dart
Speaker 1: so streamlined head first and so forth, can accelerate to
Speaker 1: a much higher terminal velocity of more like four hundred
Speaker 1: kilometers per hour, which is around a hundred and eleven
Speaker 1: meters per second, which is like double the speed of
Speaker 1: the belly flop orientation we were just talking about. And again,
Speaker 1: of course it varies depending on other factors about your body,
Speaker 1: your clothes and all that. Another thing that's going to
Speaker 1: vary is how far you have to fall before you
Speaker 1: reach or not reach, but approach terminal velocity. Again, this
Speaker 1: is going to vary according to all these individual factors
Speaker 1: about your body and how you're falling and all that.
Speaker 1: But I've come across some wildly different estimates. So one
Speaker 1: article I was reading in The Guardian by Ian sample
Speaker 1: consulted Howie Weiss, who is a professor of mathematics at
Speaker 1: Penn State University, to calculate the rules, specifically for the
Speaker 1: case of Vestna Volkovich, the Serbian flight attendant who survived
Speaker 1: the like thirty three thousand footfall. According to Weiss quote,
Speaker 1: a free falling a hundred and twenty pound or fifty
Speaker 1: four woman would have a turn rminal velocity of about
Speaker 1: thirty eight meters per second uh and UH, and she
Speaker 1: would achieve of the speed and about seven seconds. This
Speaker 1: means that she would be falling about as fast as
Speaker 1: possible after falling for only a hundred and sixty seven
Speaker 1: meters or about five hundred and fifty feet. Other estimates
Speaker 1: for human terminal velocity takes significantly more time and distance,
Speaker 1: but suffice to say that if you fall out of
Speaker 1: an airplane at cruising altitude, there is no doubt that
Speaker 1: you will end up falling as fast as you possibly can,
Speaker 1: and it will be very fast. It might be, you know,
Speaker 1: between two hundred and four hundred kilometers per hour. An
Speaker 1: interesting side note is just some anecdotes I was reading
Speaker 1: about about skydiving that mentioned what it feels like when
Speaker 1: you approach terminal velocity on a fall, Like, apparently the
Speaker 1: body sensation is different from the sensation during that period
Speaker 1: of constant acceleration that we're used to in a fall. Normally,
Speaker 1: we don't ever reach terminal velocity, so don't know what
Speaker 1: it feels like. So we think of a fall as
Speaker 1: this feeling of weightlessness, you know, the free fall feeling.
Speaker 1: But apparently once you get in your terminal velocity, I've
Speaker 1: seen some people claim you sort of feel your weight again.
Speaker 1: You sort of feel as if you are resting on
Speaker 1: a cushion made of wind. Does that make sense, like,
Speaker 1: because you're not accelerating anymore, right, right? Yeah? Because like
Speaker 1: I said when I when I jump off jumped off
Speaker 1: the high dive a couple of weeks ago, I definitely
Speaker 1: felt acceleration. I did not feel weightless. I felt very weighted. Um.
Speaker 1: But yeah, if you're reaching the point where where you're
Speaker 1: no longer accelerating, yeah, it seems like you would you
Speaker 1: would reach this point where everything is normalized at least
Speaker 1: for a few more seconds. Well, there you might. This
Speaker 1: is interesting because I sometimes feel like the words feel
Speaker 1: it that way too. But you're sort of inverting the
Speaker 1: weightless versus weighted feeling right, Like do astronauts who are
Speaker 1: forever accelerating because they're forever in free fall do they
Speaker 1: feel weight less or weighted? I guess they would say
Speaker 1: weight less, but yeah, you could also think of it
Speaker 1: as like you feel way less when your body is
Speaker 1: supported by something, or if you just stop to contemplate gravity,
Speaker 1: you can start feeling rather weighted. You know it's the because, again,
Speaker 1: these forces are acting on us at all all times.
Speaker 1: We just are used to a certain level. As we
Speaker 1: brought up a minute ago. We know from lots of
Speaker 1: human experience that a fall from just like ten can
Speaker 1: easily kill a person depending on how they land, and
Speaker 1: in those cases, you wouldn't be traveling anywhere near your
Speaker 1: terminal velocity. So obviously hitting the ground from a fall
Speaker 1: of a few hundred meters or more is going to
Speaker 1: cause massive trauma to the body and will almost always
Speaker 1: result in death. But like, how what actually happens here
Speaker 1: in the body? Well, since falling from a great height
Speaker 1: applies massive impact force to your body when you hit
Speaker 1: the ground, there are a lot of different ways for
Speaker 1: the fall to kill you, but apparently the most common
Speaker 1: fatal injury is caused by a fall or arterial damage
Speaker 1: due to the breaking of the spine. Sorry to get
Speaker 1: graphic here for a second, but this is just for
Speaker 1: the sake of specificity. Uh. The article in the Guardian
Speaker 1: quote Sean Hughes, who's a professor of surgery at Imperial
Speaker 1: College London, who says the quote, most people who fall
Speaker 1: from a great height die because they fracture their spine
Speaker 1: near the top and so transsect the a order which
Speaker 1: carries blood out of the heart. And so obviously that
Speaker 1: pretty clear why that would kill you. That that's very bad,
Speaker 1: all right, So we have we have we've described the
Speaker 1: problem here of falling from a great height and and
Speaker 1: and by necessity impacting the ground. We're gonna take a break.
Speaker 1: When we come back, we're going to discuss what the
Speaker 1: survival tactics actually are, you know too, and the extent
Speaker 1: to which you can actually deploy them during free fall.
Speaker 1: Thank alright, we're back. So obviously any fall from a
Speaker 1: great height is going to be really dangerous and it
Speaker 1: would probably kill anybody. So these high altitude survival stories
Speaker 1: are very unlikely, and you should not get it in
Speaker 1: your head that you can like jump out of an
Speaker 1: airplane and survive it. There are some factors that appear
Speaker 1: to increase a person's odds of surviving a great fall
Speaker 1: out of the sky, at least based on the anecdotes
Speaker 1: we have, so let's talk about them. I wanted to
Speaker 1: refer to a couple of pretty good articles I found
Speaker 1: on this subject, sort of collecting the opinions of experts
Speaker 1: over the years on long free falls. One was a
Speaker 1: two thousand ten article in Popular Mechanics by Dan Keppel.
Speaker 1: One was a more recent article in NPR by Paul Chisholm.
Speaker 1: And the Paul Chisholm article and NPR spoke to an
Speaker 1: associate professor of physics at Southeastern Louisiana State University named
Speaker 1: Rhet Alan, who pointed out that obviously, human survival of
Speaker 1: long free falls is not something you can run real
Speaker 1: life experiments on. You can't push people out of airplanes
Speaker 1: to test it out, so we can only reason based
Speaker 1: on sort of hypothetical scenarios and by analyzing the anecdotes
Speaker 1: of people who actually survive accidental falls. So we're sort of,
Speaker 1: you know, it's kind of like digging up fossils. It's
Speaker 1: like we're stuck with whatever data happened to have already
Speaker 1: you know, been available to us. Yeah, and it's also
Speaker 1: it's kind of a it's very much like it's a
Speaker 1: modern problem that's presented itself, you know. I mean we've
Speaker 1: barely had airplanes and uh, you know, and into a
Speaker 1: certain extent, we've barely had had had the sort of
Speaker 1: massive structures or even access to some of the massive
Speaker 1: features to to engage in these types of falls to
Speaker 1: begin with. Sure, all right, so first question, how to fall?
Speaker 1: Capital points out that you're you're actually probably better off
Speaker 1: falling out of a plane than falling out of a
Speaker 1: tall building from a height of more than a few
Speaker 1: hundred feet, because you're gonna reach similarly high speeds either way.
Speaker 1: But if you fall out out of a building, you
Speaker 1: don't really have any time, right, You're gonna hit the
Speaker 1: ground pretty much before you know it, Whereas if you
Speaker 1: fall out of the sky a few thousand meters up,
Speaker 1: you may actually have more time to plan your descend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like the figures I was I was looking at or
Speaker 1: that if you were to jump, if you jump out
Speaker 1: of a plane at a thousand feet, you basically have
Speaker 1: one minute, uh not counting you know, any you know,
Speaker 1: types of shoots you a deploy et cetera. But you
Speaker 1: basically have a minute of of of of descent. Now
Speaker 1: there are some downsides there too, though, jumping out of
Speaker 1: a plane. Uh, if you're higher up in the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: it's very possible that you could pass out due to hypoxia.
Speaker 1: Thinner atmosphere, your your lack of access to oxygen means
Speaker 1: that you black out and then maybe you know, you
Speaker 1: are not able to actually plan your descent at all
Speaker 1: because you because you're unconscious. Of course, I don't know
Speaker 1: if there's anything you can do about that other than
Speaker 1: if you know, you always want to have an oxygen
Speaker 1: mask with you. That that doesn't seem very practical. Uh.
Speaker 1: The Massachusetts based amateur historian Jim Hamilton's has collected reports
Speaker 1: of free fall survivors and noticed a few trends about
Speaker 1: survival rates in the different ways that people fall. So,
Speaker 1: passengers from airplanes, he finds, are more likely to survive
Speaker 1: if they arrive at the ground among other wreckage. He
Speaker 1: calls these people wreckage riders. That's that they're more likely
Speaker 1: to survive that than if they fall free of the
Speaker 1: plane and hit the ground. Independently, He's found almost three
Speaker 1: times as many cases of people surviving from airplane altitude
Speaker 1: as a as a wreckage writer than he has of
Speaker 1: people surviving a solo fall like Alan Magee did or
Speaker 1: McGee did. And it seems that like airplane seats and
Speaker 1: parts of the airplane fuselage and so forth can sometimes
Speaker 1: have a protective cushioning effect at the point of impact.
Speaker 1: So like, so you hit the ground, and sometimes these
Speaker 1: things can absorb some of the energy or or slow
Speaker 1: your deceleration. Al right, so if it all possible, be
Speaker 1: a wreckage writer, right. Chisholm points out that not like
Speaker 1: you have any control over this, but it helps helps
Speaker 1: you to be smaller because a person's falling speed is
Speaker 1: determined by this negotiation between gravity and air resistance. Gravity
Speaker 1: of course accelerates your fall, but air resistant slows you
Speaker 1: down and puts a limit on how much gravity can
Speaker 1: accelerate you. So as a human increases in size, this
Speaker 1: is going to affect the falling body equation in two
Speaker 1: different ways. It will increase your weight, which helps gravity
Speaker 1: overcome air resistance and makes your terminal velocity faster, pulls
Speaker 1: you faster, but will also increase your surface area. So
Speaker 1: as you increase your surface area, you increase your drag
Speaker 1: and function more like a parachute. So you just have
Speaker 1: to look into the math of which of these factors
Speaker 1: wins out as like a normal like mammal becomes bigger,
Speaker 1: and it turns out the gravity wins out. Even though
Speaker 1: you increase your surface area, the extra weight makes a
Speaker 1: bigger difference. So like if you drop an ant off
Speaker 1: your roof, it's probably gonna be fine when it hits
Speaker 1: the ground. You drop a horse off your roof, not
Speaker 1: so much. Oh yeah, I mean insects and other invertebrates
Speaker 1: are are a notorously great followers. They can fall from
Speaker 1: great heights and and suffer no damage. Yeah. There's a
Speaker 1: quote from JBS holiday In writing in n who wrote,
Speaker 1: you can drop a mouse down a thousand yard mind shaft,
Speaker 1: and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight
Speaker 1: shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man
Speaker 1: is broken, a horse splashes. Uh. Keppel's article notes also
Speaker 1: along similar lines, that it may help to be a child.
Speaker 1: For some reason, many of the survivors of airplane related
Speaker 1: free fall or children, And this is obviously anecdotal, but
Speaker 1: the trend probably indicates something. Uh. He writes quote. The
Speaker 1: Federal Aviation Agency study notes that kids, especially they're those
Speaker 1: under the age of four, have more flexible skeletons, more
Speaker 1: relaxed muscle tonus, and a higher proportion of subcutaneous fat,
Speaker 1: which helps protect internal organs. Well, this, this, uh matches
Speaker 1: up with research I've done in the past on just
Speaker 1: sort of the durability of children. Yeah. You know, especially
Speaker 1: as parents, we often think of young children as being
Speaker 1: just you know, highly vulnerable, and in certain respects they are,
Speaker 1: but they are also uh, they having all to be
Speaker 1: durable at that stage as well, and to you know,
Speaker 1: to survive falls and stumbles and the you know, the
Speaker 1: various kind of hazards that they are inevitably going to
Speaker 1: encounter at that age. Also, this feature of falling might
Speaker 1: be obvious, but if you can somehow slow yourself down
Speaker 1: with some kind of parachute like object, that's good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's something that comes up in some of the
Speaker 1: accounts I was looking at, because a lot of the
Speaker 1: accounts do involve uh, sky divers, people who are of
Speaker 1: course putting themselves in a position like this on a
Speaker 1: regular basis, you know, actually falling through the sky and
Speaker 1: you know, most of the time, they you know that
Speaker 1: their shoots are gonna work just like they hope they would.
Speaker 1: But when you encounter a technical problem with the shoot,
Speaker 1: like sometimes the shoot even though the shoots failing, it
Speaker 1: is still sort of like half deploying or it's doing
Speaker 1: something to spin them around and and potentially uh, you know,
Speaker 1: disrupt their acceleration. Yeah. I mean anything that is slowing
Speaker 1: you down as good, even if it's not slowing you
Speaker 1: down as much as it's supposed to. If it's slowing
Speaker 1: you down some, that's increasing your odds. Okay, next question
Speaker 1: is a big question where to land. So if you
Speaker 1: accept that you can somewhat steer your fall by the
Speaker 1: way you orient your body in the air, you might
Speaker 1: have some amount of power over exactly where you come down. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the bottom line for for where you land is
Speaker 1: that you want to increase your deceleration distance. You want
Speaker 1: to spread out your slow down over a bigger distance
Speaker 1: rather than slowing down and stopping all at once. So
Speaker 1: if you like in a cartoon, if you could aim
Speaker 1: for the mattress factory exactly, Yeah, that would be where
Speaker 1: you would want to land. And this is why landing
Speaker 1: in a net helps or something. You know, the net,
Speaker 1: like the tension of it absorbs some of the energy
Speaker 1: of your fall and it slows down your deceleration or
Speaker 1: do you decelerate over a longer distance as the net
Speaker 1: stretches when it catches you. So if you could actually
Speaker 1: aim for any enormous circus tent like that would be ideal,
Speaker 1: not I mean, and if there happened to be a
Speaker 1: netted inside the circus tent for the trapeze artist, you know,
Speaker 1: I guess that would help as well. Right now, normally
Speaker 1: there's not going to be a net out anywhere that
Speaker 1: you would be falling, but some there are some things
Speaker 1: that might be kind of equivalent, probably not as good
Speaker 1: as a net. Falling into trees or bushes seems to
Speaker 1: have both positives and negatives, but I think the positives
Speaker 1: might outweigh the negatives. By hitting plant matter, you increase
Speaker 1: your deceleration distance and you slow your fall more gradually,
Speaker 1: because I mean, you probably are going to get very
Speaker 1: injured if you fall into plant matter. But by like
Speaker 1: hitting branches at different levels instead of stopping at the
Speaker 1: ground all at once, you slow your fall. You kind
Speaker 1: of put your your your injury on the installment plant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then also you, I mean, there are downsides. You
Speaker 1: run the risk of being like stabbed by branches as
Speaker 1: you fall into trees, but there are people who have
Speaker 1: survived really long falls by falling into thick plant matter,
Speaker 1: into bushes or into tree limbs. Snow seems to be
Speaker 1: a very good choice. There are multiple accounts of people
Speaker 1: surviving great falls after landing in snow. I would imagine
Speaker 1: that unpacked snow is best. Again, you want, you know,
Speaker 1: a softer thing to crash into too slow to increase
Speaker 1: your deceleration distance. Haystacks are apparently good. And then hitting
Speaker 1: the roof of some types of human structures can be
Speaker 1: better than hitting solid ground. Specifically if you think that
Speaker 1: the roof might that you might break through the roof
Speaker 1: like Alan McGee crashing through the glass skylight at the
Speaker 1: train station, because this breakthrough point is going to slow
Speaker 1: your fall without completely stopping you all at once. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or like a thatched roof would be ideal as well.
Speaker 1: You know, to bring up a pro wrestling example here,
Speaker 1: anyone who has watched the pro wrestling has probably seen
Speaker 1: somebody fall off of something through a table, through something
Speaker 1: like a folding table, it makes an impressive noise. It
Speaker 1: looks impressive to watch this falling body. Uh you know
Speaker 1: destroy a table, sometimes two or three tables on the
Speaker 1: way down. But of course ultimately that is breaking the
Speaker 1: fall of the wrestler and hurt the more to just
Speaker 1: go straight to the ground. Yeah. The accounts I've heard
Speaker 1: of from pro wrestlers of them taking bumps where they say,
Speaker 1: jump off of the top rope and land just on
Speaker 1: their back at the ringside, like that has been Like,
Speaker 1: those have been the scarier bumps they've described where they
Speaker 1: talk about their like feeling their organs like jostle around
Speaker 1: inside their body. That is not a feeling I want
Speaker 1: to feel. Right. So, in the same way, if you're
Speaker 1: falling off the top rope, you should aim for the
Speaker 1: tables and uh, you know, even if it's not completely cafe.
Speaker 1: And if you're jumping out of the if you're falling
Speaker 1: out of that plane, you should aim for the thatch,
Speaker 1: groof for the or even the the the greenhouse or
Speaker 1: you know, whatever is better than just hitting just the
Speaker 1: you know, an open pavement area. Yeah, exactly. Again, what
Speaker 1: you want to think is something that will make you
Speaker 1: not stop all at once. Now, A big question here
Speaker 1: is actually about water. There's disagreement about whether water is
Speaker 1: a good choice. Hitting water at high speed is not
Speaker 1: like jumping off the high dive. Hitting water at high
Speaker 1: speed will still cause massive injuries. It's often said that
Speaker 1: hitting water after a great fall isn't that much different
Speaker 1: from hitting concrete. Right. However, I will say, do a
Speaker 1: belly flop off the high dive, or actually, don't do
Speaker 1: a belly flop off the hide, but don't just do
Speaker 1: a normal belly flop off of a normal diving board
Speaker 1: or a cannonball. What have you feel that smack of
Speaker 1: water against your body and uh, and you you get
Speaker 1: a sense of what some of the physics we're talking
Speaker 1: about here, because that that that smack can sting, and
Speaker 1: we're talking a fall of like you know, four or
Speaker 1: five feet, yeah, exactly. Uh. And then also with water,
Speaker 1: you had the risk that even if you survived the impact,
Speaker 1: you could be injured or knocked unconscious. And then you're
Speaker 1: at risk of drowning, right because you're in the water. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you have to hit water, there's also a question
Speaker 1: of how best to orient your body. I guess we
Speaker 1: can look at that along with the next question, which
Speaker 1: is how to land, not where to land U. So
Speaker 1: there's conflicting advice and research indications here. There there are
Speaker 1: very few clear takeaways except don't land on your head, right.
Speaker 1: But to explore the discrepancies we've come across, so, Keppel's
Speaker 1: article introduces the difficulty in knowing the best way to
Speaker 1: position the body for impact. Uh. Kepple looks at in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty two study in the journal war Medicine that
Speaker 1: seemed to be of the opinion that the best bet
Speaker 1: is distribution of impact pressure across the body through quote
Speaker 1: wide body impact. So that makes it sound like you'd
Speaker 1: want a belly flop off there, Maybe not belly flop,
Speaker 1: but somehow distributed across the body, uh, you know, longitudinally.
Speaker 1: Then again, there was a nineteen sixty three report by
Speaker 1: the Federal Aviation Agency that argued that survival is most
Speaker 1: likely if you get into quote the classic sky diver's
Speaker 1: landing stance feet together. Heals up flexed knees and hips.
Speaker 1: Keppel argues that studies of people jumping from bridges indicate
Speaker 1: that the best way to survive hitting water is probably
Speaker 1: what's known as the pence. So that's like feet first
Speaker 1: knife like kind of entry. But obviously this doesn't always work. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he also points out the tradition of cliff divers
Speaker 1: of Acapulco who dive head first from great heights and
Speaker 1: they lock their hands together with arms outstretched over their
Speaker 1: heads to protect their heads from the impact with the water.
Speaker 1: He also advises for water landings quote clinch your butt.
Speaker 1: So unfortunately it seems like a jumble of conflicting advice there,
Speaker 1: and and it doesn't get any better with the other
Speaker 1: sources we were looking at. Chisholm's article consults some experts
Speaker 1: here that also are not in agreement. Uh. The the
Speaker 1: the expert we mentioned earlier, at Alan points out that
Speaker 1: for some reason, some studies have found that human bodies
Speaker 1: seem to be generally more tolerant of G forces in
Speaker 1: particular directions, like NASA figured this out during some of
Speaker 1: their experiments with test pilots in the nineteen sixties, that
Speaker 1: the body seems more tolerant of G forces pushing from
Speaker 1: the front of the body to the back. This is
Speaker 1: referred to and you sort of pay sure this This
Speaker 1: is referred to as eyeballs in G force as opposed
Speaker 1: to eyeballs out up or down. Other types of forces
Speaker 1: such as eyeballs down are more traumatic to the body.
Speaker 1: So I hadn't really thought about this, but but it
Speaker 1: makes sense when you when you look at various um
Speaker 1: like especially like supersonic aircraft. You may, of course you're
Speaker 1: gonna have a pilot position where they need to have
Speaker 1: a forward facing view out of the airplane, but you
Speaker 1: may have other roles in the plane that do not
Speaker 1: require that, or even you know, do not allow a
Speaker 1: direct forward facing view out of the plane. And in
Speaker 1: those cases you still have the uh, this particular individual
Speaker 1: will still be facing forward, Yeah, because apparently the body
Speaker 1: is more tolerant of g forces that right. Um So,
Speaker 1: given this consideration, it might seem like the best way
Speaker 1: for your body to absorb impact would be the land
Speaker 1: on your back face up. But there's a problem with that,
Speaker 1: which is that it seems like this would be more
Speaker 1: likely to generate a harder impact on the head, which
Speaker 1: is exactly what you don't want to do, to say
Speaker 1: nothing of the spine. I mean, it's almost like we're
Speaker 1: not designed for this kind of impact at all, exactly.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's bad no matter how you do it.
Speaker 1: There one last source they look at here is the
Speaker 1: Chisholm mentions, a study by the Highway Safety Research Institute
Speaker 1: from ninety which looked at over a hundred case studies
Speaker 1: of fall victims, and note that these were short distance falls,
Speaker 1: probably not terminal velocity falls. But the study found that
Speaker 1: landing feet first gives you the best survival odds. So basically,
Speaker 1: here we've heard almost every different kind of possible recommendation
Speaker 1: for how to orient the body for landing except land
Speaker 1: on your head. You don't want to land on your head.
Speaker 1: I would have to say that this seems like an
Speaker 1: area in which the science is not settled. So when
Speaker 1: we were, you know, looking into this, I have to
Speaker 1: say that the first thing that came into my mind
Speaker 1: was the Kids in the Hall sketch. Really yeah, I
Speaker 1: used to be a big Kids in the Hall of
Speaker 1: fan just because it was you know, it was on
Speaker 1: TV all the time, so I was always watching Kids
Speaker 1: in the Hall. I loved Kids in the Hall. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's some some wonderful sketches in there. But there was
Speaker 1: a particular sketch from season one titled The Odds, during
Speaker 1: which a bunch of sky divers are encountering just a
Speaker 1: series of fatal parachute mishaps, one after the other, and
Speaker 1: and finally, uh, Bruce McCulloch's character is the last one
Speaker 1: left on the plane that that hasn't jumped, and he's
Speaker 1: they're having a discussion with Mark McKinney's character, and Bruce's
Speaker 1: character begins discussing the odds of this series of terrible
Speaker 1: jumps occurring the way they occurred, and he finally reaches
Speaker 1: an illogical conclusion. So Bruce's character, you know, says, says, says, says, right, alright, alright,
Speaker 1: you know it's like, okay, well, what are the odds
Speaker 1: of all this happening? Where the odds of four individuals
Speaker 1: plumbing to their deaths with one of them being on
Speaker 1: the very first jump, two of them being twins, and
Speaker 1: then one winning the lottery, Like all of these these
Speaker 1: odds would make it just just insurmountable. And then Mark's
Speaker 1: character tells him what would be roughly sixty three million
Speaker 1: to one, and Ruce's character says, quote, not good enough.
Speaker 1: If these parachutes, I've been watching them defy the odds
Speaker 1: all day. I'm jumping without one, and then he takes
Speaker 1: off his parachute and he says, he asked, what are
Speaker 1: the odds of a guy jumping from ten thousand feet
Speaker 1: and hitting the pavement running? And Mark tells him two
Speaker 1: to one, and then Bruce says, good, I'm off, and
Speaker 1: he said, I'm feeling lucky. He jumps and he's saying
Speaker 1: it's working, it's working, it's working, and then there's a
Speaker 1: splat sound. Right. But so so, I have to say
Speaker 1: I've never given the scenario a lot of scrutiny, but
Speaker 1: I do think of it every single time someone discusses
Speaker 1: hitting the ground running on the topic. I imagine um,
Speaker 1: Bruce McCulloch, um, you know, plumbting to his death with
Speaker 1: this optimism in mind. And I think that the kid
Speaker 1: is kind of a fun send up of our basic
Speaker 1: inability to comprehend large numbers or or the odds of
Speaker 1: any given scenario. Well, it makes me think about that
Speaker 1: old thing where it's like, if you're in a in
Speaker 1: a plane that's going down or an elevator that's falling,
Speaker 1: if you jump at the last second, then you'll be fine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not how it works, isn't you know? Not not
Speaker 1: at all. And by the way I look to see,
Speaker 1: I was thinking, Well, kids in the hall has been
Speaker 1: out a while, and people are always doing you know,
Speaker 1: kind of interesting like physics based blog post or even
Speaker 1: full fledged papers exploring a particular topic. And I haven't
Speaker 1: seen anybody you know, um myth bust uh this particular sketch.
Speaker 1: Yet maybe I'm wrong. If I am wrong, someone please
Speaker 1: send me in some myth busting on this. But I
Speaker 1: think the basic idea is hitting the ground running would
Speaker 1: not work. And this line of thinking does fall in,
Speaker 1: like you said, with the idea of well, could you
Speaker 1: jump out of a crashing plane right before it hits
Speaker 1: the ground and survive? And this question, these questions in general,
Speaker 1: tend to ignore the fact that you're not merely a
Speaker 1: board of falling plane. You're falling with the plane, and
Speaker 1: if you jump off the plane, you're still falling at
Speaker 1: the same pace with the same acceleration. Especially at high speeds.
Speaker 1: There's virtually no scenario in which the jump is going
Speaker 1: to make, you know, a huge difference. But when I
Speaker 1: was looking around about this, I did run across another
Speaker 1: account of survival from a fall of a great height. Uh,
Speaker 1: similar scenario to some of the ones we've discussed already. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was the It's the story of two thousand six
Speaker 1: survival story of the twenty five year old experienced experienced
Speaker 1: jumper who encountered a series of shoot malfunctions from a
Speaker 1: fifteen thousand foot jump and uh, there there's an interview
Speaker 1: with this guy on Vice. Uh and basically he tried everything. Um,
Speaker 1: you know, he had a very logical fall, you know,
Speaker 1: where he's like, he's deploying the first shoot doesn't work. Okay,
Speaker 1: deploying the second shoot, uh does not work. And uh,
Speaker 1: and then he kind of makes a rushed logical peace
Speaker 1: with death at that point where he's like, Okay, I've
Speaker 1: done everything, I can do, nothing else I can do.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm probably gonna die. And he essentially goes limp
Speaker 1: and falls and impacts in a small BlackBerry bush, like
Speaker 1: not a huge bush, but you know, a fairly small
Speaker 1: one by his description. He ends up shattering his left
Speaker 1: foot like really badly, but he survived. He didn't hit
Speaker 1: the ground vertically but and so so the impact was
Speaker 1: you know, deflected through his body. And in the Vice
Speaker 1: interview he recommended his recommendations for falling, which he said,
Speaker 1: ultimately he he didn't have any logical um strategy in mind.
Speaker 1: He just was like, Okay, I guess I'm hitting the ground.
Speaker 1: But he said in retrospect he would say don't tense up,
Speaker 1: you know, in the same and then we see this
Speaker 1: in discussion of car crashes as well, like like don't
Speaker 1: tense your body for the impact if if you at
Speaker 1: all have any say so in this. And then also
Speaker 1: land in a shrub or a tree if you can,
Speaker 1: which falls in line with some of the advice and
Speaker 1: uh analysis we looked at already. Yeah, well i'd say
Speaker 1: top lane takeaway today. Don't jump out of an airplane
Speaker 1: without a parachute. Don't fall out of an airplane without
Speaker 1: a parachute if you can help it. If you are
Speaker 1: in the scenario, see if you can land in like
Speaker 1: some snow and try not to land on your head. Right.
Speaker 1: And as for the kids in the Hall method, I
Speaker 1: guess you know, the jury is still out, but that's
Speaker 1: probably not going to be your best strategy either. All right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it. Uh. The fun thing about
Speaker 1: this episode is that I know we have some skydivers
Speaker 1: out there. We have to have some skydivers. We've heard
Speaker 1: from skydivers before. All right, Well, now it's really there
Speaker 1: time to shine because I wanna you know, we want
Speaker 1: to hear anything just about your your your thoughts on
Speaker 1: this particular topic. Certainly if you know anybody who has
Speaker 1: a survival story like this or app on in yourself
Speaker 1: to share, we would love to hear that. But just
Speaker 1: in general, like your your thoughts on on the you know,
Speaker 1: the feeling, the sensation of of of descending through the
Speaker 1: air at these these great speeds and with these great,
Speaker 1: great distances. What is that like? We would love to
Speaker 1: hear from you. What does it feel like to hit
Speaker 1: terminal velocity when you freefall? Yeah? Where do you fall
Speaker 1: in on? Our various descriptions of you know, feeling weighted
Speaker 1: versus feeling weightless. In the meantime, check out stuff to
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Speaker 1: wets where you'll find all the episodes of this show.
Speaker 1: If you want to chat about the show with other listeners,
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Speaker 1: do so, and make sure you have subscribed not only
Speaker 1: to Stuftable your Mind, but Hey, the other podcast that
Speaker 1: Joe and I also host, which is called Invention. That's
Speaker 1: one episode a week. Each episode is a different invention,
Speaker 1: or at least an episode on a particular invention or
Speaker 1: a sort of a train of thought with inventions looking
Speaker 1: at basically human techno history, all this weird technology that
Speaker 1: that humans leave behind, and what it says about us,
Speaker 1: what it says about human existence before the advent of
Speaker 1: these different inventions. Huge things. As always to our excellent
Speaker 1: audio producers Seth Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you'd
Speaker 1: like to get in touch with us with feedback on
Speaker 1: this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for
Speaker 1: the future, or just to say hello, you can email
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