Speaker 1: Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick and Robert. I know you've got a
Speaker 1: love for older aircraft, so I wanted to start off
Speaker 1: talking today about an aircraft. I think I know you've
Speaker 1: mentioned it before. I think you've got a spot in
Speaker 1: your heart for it. It's the best seventeen flying Fortress.
Speaker 1: Oh of course. Yeah. So this was a gigantic four
Speaker 1: engine heavy bomber developed by Boeing that was used by
Speaker 1: the United States in World War Two, primarily for long range,
Speaker 1: high altitude bombing raids against Germany and Nazi occupied targets
Speaker 1: in Europe, and to a lesser extent it was used
Speaker 1: some in the Pacific theater. Oh and I guess just
Speaker 1: to clarify what I said a minute ago, I mean
Speaker 1: when I say you've got a spot in your heart
Speaker 1: for this, I don't mean like you love war and
Speaker 1: bombing and killing. I mean that like I know that
Speaker 1: you have a kind of love for the aesthetics of
Speaker 1: airplane design. Yeah, yeah, I mean, my my dad was
Speaker 1: World War Two buff and he and more importantly he
Speaker 1: was he was really into creating, to working on scale
Speaker 1: model kits and mostly World War Two scale models. And
Speaker 1: so the B seventeen uh was certainly a plane that
Speaker 1: was one of his favorites. And you know, he was
Speaker 1: always telling me about it, and he had like a
Speaker 1: prized model of it, like probably like you know, his
Speaker 1: the masterpiece of his his scale modeling time. Uh and
Speaker 1: uh and so yeah, I grew up amid these depictions
Speaker 1: of the B seventeen. I mean, it's it's a very
Speaker 1: iconic plane. Um. And it's the third most produced bomber
Speaker 1: of all time. It was an icon of US air
Speaker 1: superiority and uh. And it's a highly successful design and
Speaker 1: they were used for various post war purposes as well.
Speaker 1: And there's actually there's somewhere in the neighborhood of like
Speaker 1: I want to say, ten B seventeens that are actually
Speaker 1: still airworthy. Oh yeah, I think I was reading that
Speaker 1: there are like some that are actually still in flight somewhere.
Speaker 1: Well they're kept, you know, in an air worthy condition.
Speaker 1: And it's harder to keep an older plane like this
Speaker 1: in airworthy condition. But but with a plane that where
Speaker 1: the design is solid and it has this iconic status
Speaker 1: in uh, you know, in American aviation history. You're going
Speaker 1: to to to to keep those going as long as
Speaker 1: you can, and even the ones that aren't air worthy,
Speaker 1: there are a number of just fantastically restored um B
Speaker 1: seven teams in museums aviation museums around the world. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's so it was a strategically important aircraft, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, so it was this heavily armored aircraft that
Speaker 1: was played a huge role in in Allied victory in Europe,
Speaker 1: and it was it was sort of famous for like
Speaker 1: taking a beating in the course of its mission before
Speaker 1: returning to base intact and landing with lots of visible
Speaker 1: combat damage. Right. And I guess this is tied up
Speaker 1: in the idea of that that it's called the flying fortress. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And then again we don't want to romanticize the this
Speaker 1: weapon of war too much. It was used to kill
Speaker 1: a lot of people, of course, and 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
Speaker 1: this this vessel, this uh, this this airplane you're sitting
Speaker 1: up into the sky, sending it into into into enemy
Speaker 1: territory to rain bombs down on them, and then you
Speaker 1: want to have it protected. So, of course, the main
Speaker 1: thing you can do is have if you have fighter
Speaker 1: planes to accompany it, faster subtle uh death machines that
Speaker 1: can fly about and pick off things that are trying
Speaker 1: to 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 side, gunners, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: one of the defense features of the B seventeen, what
Speaker 1: you're getting to is now famous, or maybe more importantly infamous.
Speaker 1: It's the ball turret, the lower turret, that is this
Speaker 1: pair of manned machine guns inside a plexiglass dome or
Speaker 1: ball on the bottom of the aircraft. Yeah, it's I'm
Speaker 1: sure it looked science fiction in at the time, and
Speaker 1: it still looks science fiction and when you see it now,
Speaker 1: if you if you're not expecting it. Uh So, this
Speaker 1: is the Sperry ball turret. And it was only introduced
Speaker 1: in the in the B seventeen E series, but it
Speaker 1: was included on in all subsequent series of the B
Speaker 1: seventeen bomber. It was also deployed in the B twenty
Speaker 1: four Liberator, which is another heavy bomber, and then a
Speaker 1: couple of a couple of other planes. But yeah, it
Speaker 1: was super small, so small that you typically had to
Speaker 1: pinpoint a particularly small adult airmen to go into the ball.
Speaker 1: And then on top it was in a comfy not comfy,
Speaker 1: the exact opposite of comfy, cozy, snug tight. Yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: he is essentially in a fetal position the whole time,
Speaker 1: only instead of of having all the warmth and safety
Speaker 1: that you know comes with the idea of returning to
Speaker 1: the womb, you are not you are not in the
Speaker 1: womb in the ball turret. You're not even in the
Speaker 1: middle of the plane. You're you're beneath the plane. You're
Speaker 1: sort of halfway hanging out underneath this this bomber exposed
Speaker 1: to any interceptor aircraft that are flying up underneath, and
Speaker 1: hopefully you're gonna be able to do something about it
Speaker 1: with your machine guns. And if something goes wrong, well,
Speaker 1: the bad news is there's there's not actually room in
Speaker 1: the ball for you to wear your parachute. Uh. In
Speaker 1: some cases they would leave the parachute uh just above
Speaker 1: them in the main fuselage, or if there was room,
Speaker 1: you might bring it in strapped to your chest. That's
Speaker 1: gonna come back in just a minute. So I've thought
Speaker 1: about the ball tour it a lot, not because I
Speaker 1: I know nearly as much about about older aircraft as you, Robert,
Speaker 1: but because specifically because of a poem that I read
Speaker 1: for the first time many years ago. That it's just
Speaker 1: a five line poem by the American poet Randall Jarrell
Speaker 1: called the Death of the Ball Turret Gunner. It was
Speaker 1: written in nineteen about is World War two experience, and
Speaker 1: it captures this, uh, the sort of cramped terror. Here.
Speaker 1: It goes from my mother's sleep, I fell into the
Speaker 1: state and I hunched in its belly till my wet
Speaker 1: fur froze six miles from Earth, loosed from its dream
Speaker 1: of life. I woke to black Flak and the Nightmare Fighters.
Speaker 1: When I died, they washed me out of the turret
Speaker 1: with a hose man. That is rough. I don't think
Speaker 1: I've heard that before. UM, I should throw in like
Speaker 1: a couple of things. So first of all, the turret
Speaker 1: does like rotate and move around. It's like a little
Speaker 1: carnival ride right underneath the plane, so you can aim right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you need more degrees of freedom to chase the moving
Speaker 1: targets that are coming at you from below right, And
Speaker 1: and on top of that, I cannot begin to imagine
Speaker 1: how terrifying it really was. Like I get a little
Speaker 1: anxious when I fly in general, and to imagine myself
Speaker 1: like slung below this uh this you know, rattling warplane
Speaker 1: trammed into a clear ball, the bottom just exposed. And
Speaker 1: then if you have like you know, all these uh
Speaker 1: you know, all the chaos of war, the explosions happening
Speaker 1: all around you. UM. I recently watched Hulu's adaptation of
Speaker 1: Catch twenty two, which is different aircraft, um and no
Speaker 1: ball to it, but it does a great job of
Speaker 1: just showing, uh, you know, immersing you in this idea
Speaker 1: of just how terrifying a bomber run was even in
Speaker 1: Catch twenty two, they're not even dealing with interceptor craft.
Speaker 1: They're just dealing with anti aircraft fire, and it's they
Speaker 1: just do a wonderful job of just making you feel
Speaker 1: the sheer terror of the characters flying into battle without
Speaker 1: any 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, dispel ling the hero myth
Speaker 1: with a healthy dose of absurdity. Yeah. Well, I want
Speaker 1: to talk about one of those terrifying experiences and use
Speaker 1: that to connect to the subject of the rest of
Speaker 1: today's episode. So, h let's look at the story of
Speaker 1: one particular bald turret gunner during World War Two. He
Speaker 1: was an American staff sergeant named Alan either Magey or
Speaker 1: McGhee m ag e e. I'm gonna call him McGhee
Speaker 1: for the rest of the episode here. So, in January
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty three, Staff Sergeant McGhee was manning the
Speaker 1: turret of a B seventeen that had been nicknamed snap
Speaker 1: crackle pop. Uh. Don't know what that comes from, but
Speaker 1: I have to imagine it's from probably bullets hitting the plane.
Speaker 1: I don't know, but that's my guess. So the plane
Speaker 1: was on a bombing run over an area of Nazi
Speaker 1: occupied France when it suddenly took heavy fire from German
Speaker 1: fighters and it began to break apart in the air
Speaker 1: at about twenty thousand feet or about six thousand, seven
Speaker 1: hundred meters up and in the chaos us as the
Speaker 1: airplane was coming apart in the atmosphere, McGee managed to
Speaker 1: escape his ball, tore it and jump out of the
Speaker 1: falling and uh separating plane parts. But he didn't have
Speaker 1: a parachute. He had not been wearing one, probably because
Speaker 1: he couldn't fit into the ball with it on. So
Speaker 1: he's outside the plane falling at twenty feet So you
Speaker 1: would think, obviously this is just certain death, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there just would be no way you'd survive. You're just
Speaker 1: you're just dead in the air basically, Yeah, falling without
Speaker 1: a parachute for twenty feet, which is about six point
Speaker 1: one kilometers in altitude, there's no way to survive that.
Speaker 1: But strangely McGee 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 bones,
Speaker 1: and he had cuts all over his body, but he
Speaker 1: was alive. Apparently, the way McGhee survived had to do
Speaker 1: with how he landed. Instead of hitting the ground, McGhee
Speaker 1: had just by luck, crashed through a glass ceiling in
Speaker 1: a train station at St. Nazaire, and the impact of
Speaker 1: crashing through the glass must have slowed his fall enough
Speaker 1: that he was not killed when he hit the floor below.
Speaker 1: And so as unbelievable as this story is, McGhee is
Speaker 1: not the only one. There are actually lots of interesting,
Speaker 1: fascinating long fall survival stories in which people fall, you know,
Speaker 1: what would normally be absolutely lethal distances without a parachute,
Speaker 1: but somehow managed to survive in one way or another.
Speaker 1: And that's what we wanted to talk about today, and
Speaker 1: and it should we should drive home like we're doing.
Speaker 1: We're dealing with distances here that are almost this seemed
Speaker 1: almost absolutely lethal and you certainly do not have to
Speaker 1: fall far at all to suffer a fatal injury. Oh no,
Speaker 1: you can easily die from a ten or twenty footfall.
Speaker 1: But they're falling from ten thousand, twenty thousand feet. It
Speaker 1: just seems astounding, It seems unreal, Like to survive such
Speaker 1: a fall, you would just have to become just instantly
Speaker 1: hyper religious, right, you just have to assume angels appeared
Speaker 1: and uh and took your unconscious body down to the earth. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of people do kind of go to those
Speaker 1: miraculous explanations, but it turns out that there are some
Speaker 1: pretty consistent, not totally consistent, but there are some common
Speaker 1: physical characteristics of the types of falls that people survive from.
Speaker 1: It has to do with how you fall, how you land,
Speaker 1: where you land, and so that's what we wanted to
Speaker 1: explore for the rest of the day. Now. One thing
Speaker 1: that's funny is that, like, it seems like falling out
Speaker 1: of 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 eve what's called terminal velocity,
Speaker 1: will explain more about that in a bit. It's a
Speaker 1: speed that's not a not a constant, but it's going
Speaker 1: to vary depending on who you are, what you're what
Speaker 1: you weigh, what you're shaped like, what you're wearing, you
Speaker 1: know how, all that kind of stuff. As long as
Speaker 1: you fall far enough to achieve that, and that might
Speaker 1: just be you know, a few hundred meters, then you
Speaker 1: then you're basically falling as fast as you're gonna fall,
Speaker 1: And actually falling from an airplane isn't any worse and
Speaker 1: in some crazy ways could actually be better. Uh So,
Speaker 1: But anyway, well we'll come back to all that. I
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about a few other known cases from history.
Speaker 1: So one case of somebody who fell out of an
Speaker 1: airplane and survived is Christine Mackenzie. She didn't actually fall
Speaker 1: out of an airplane. She jumped. She's an experienced South
Speaker 1: African skydiver who had already jumped more than a hundred times.
Speaker 1: When both her main parachute and her backup parachute failed
Speaker 1: on the same freefall in August two thousand four, so
Speaker 1: she fell about eleven thousand feet and survived by instead
Speaker 1: of hitting the ground directly, she first hits some suspended
Speaker 1: power lines before impact, and sort of like the glass
Speaker 1: ceiling and McGee's fall, the tension of the power lines
Speaker 1: is thought to have absorbed a lot of the energy
Speaker 1: of her fall and slowed her down in the process,
Speaker 1: so that when she finally hit the ground, she ended
Speaker 1: up with only a broken pelvis. Her fall lasted about
Speaker 1: forty five seconds. So let's let's entertain belief in guardian
Speaker 1: angels again for a second. Can you imagine the sort
Speaker 1: of scenario where you're falling and then the angel appears
Speaker 1: and says, look, I know this looks bad, but don't worry.
Speaker 1: You're headed towards some high tension wires. Everything's gonna be fine.
Speaker 1: I just assumed I would be. I would assume I
Speaker 1: would be torn in half. You know, well, I mean
Speaker 1: I'm sure, I'm sure. It depends on how you hit
Speaker 1: them and all that. Another name, this one comes up
Speaker 1: a lot. It's a very famous case. This is Vesna Volkovich.
Speaker 1: Some 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.
Speaker 1: So Vesna Volovich was a Serbian flight attendant on a
Speaker 1: DC nine that was in the air over the Czech
Speaker 1: Republic in nineteen seventy two when the cabin exploded, probably
Speaker 1: due to a bomb from a terrorism attack. She fell
Speaker 1: more than ten thousand one ms or more than thirty
Speaker 1: three thousand feet without a parachute, and she suffered severe
Speaker 1: injuries and broken bones and was in a coma for weeks.
Speaker 1: But she survived, and the question is how well Her
Speaker 1: survival is usually attributed to the fact that while most
Speaker 1: of the rest of the passengers were blown out of
Speaker 1: the cabin when the fuselage broke apart, Volkovich was pinned
Speaker 1: inside by a food card and possibly by another member
Speaker 1: of the crew or a passenger, and so she stuck
Speaker 1: inside the fuselage. And then the broken part of the
Speaker 1: fuselage in which she was stuck just happened to land
Speaker 1: on a snowy recovered hillside, and it's believed that the
Speaker 1: trees and the snow cushioned the impact. After she woke up,
Speaker 1: she had no memory of the crash, and she lived
Speaker 1: until sixteen. She's often cited as the record holder for
Speaker 1: the survivor of the longest fall without a parachute. Wow,
Speaker 1: that that is incredible. 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 are not listening to this
Speaker 1: at 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 Julienne Kepki now Julianne 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 crash.
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, how casting the angels aside?
Speaker 1: What are the what are the logical, real life scientific answers? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know behind the survive stories where we're gonna take
Speaker 1: a break and when we come back we will discuss
Speaker 1: just that. Alright, we're back. So Robert, you want to
Speaker 1: look at the physics of falling from a great height.
Speaker 1: Let's do it. Okay, So falling from a great height
Speaker 1: can kill you in a number of ways. I mean,
Speaker 1: just not to get too graphic, but one problem would
Speaker 1: be like what if you fall on a spike or something,
Speaker 1: you know, they're all these sort of like specific cases
Speaker 1: of what can happen to you when you hit the ground.
Speaker 1: But that's the key, right, right, the fall itself. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's that's easy enough to do. Um And surviving the
Speaker 1: fall is one thing. It's surviving the impact that is
Speaker 1: the problem, right. I mean, no matter where you land,
Speaker 1: the main problem that that you're going to encounter is
Speaker 1: going to be the difference between how fast you were
Speaker 1: falling and how suddenly you stop. Uh So, what happens
Speaker 1: when you fall from an incredible altitude, Well, we know
Speaker 1: there is gravity, right, There's an attraction between the earth
Speaker 1: and your body due to gravity, and gravity accelerates you
Speaker 1: relentlessly towards the center of the Earth. Not just when
Speaker 1: you're falling, but even right now, no matter where you are,
Speaker 1: gravity is relentlessly accelerating you towards the center of the Earth.
Speaker 1: And you will continue to accelerate towards the center of
Speaker 1: the Earth until something like the ground, or water or
Speaker 1: the air provides a compensating resistance to stop you from
Speaker 1: from going faster towards the center of the Earth. So
Speaker 1: that's probably the ground that's doing that to you right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I recently was thinking a bit about this when I
Speaker 1: was jumping off of a high dive. Um, and I
Speaker 1: had been a long time since I jumped off a
Speaker 1: high dive, but I was just really struck by just
Speaker 1: the feeling of of of being wanted by gravity that
Speaker 1: like you, you really you really feel it, um, you know,
Speaker 1: more so than off of just a normal board. You
Speaker 1: feel yourself accelerating, You feel yourself, you know, pulled down
Speaker 1: with dramatic speed toward the surface of the water. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of weird to think about, but the force
Speaker 1: of gravity and the force of acceleration feel exactly the
Speaker 1: same to us. They are indistinguishable. They act the same
Speaker 1: way on our bodies. This is why you can you
Speaker 1: acceleration to provide artificial gravity and space. Right just by
Speaker 1: like continuously accelerating a capsule or providing angular momentum acceleration
Speaker 1: in a circular pattern, you can pretty much perfectly simulate
Speaker 1: what gravity is like. So if you're on or near
Speaker 1: the Earth's surface, you are sort of permanently on an
Speaker 1: invisible train that wants to begin accelerating straight down at
Speaker 1: nine point eight meters per second per second, and we'll
Speaker 1: just keep going nine point eight meters per second, faster
Speaker 1: every second, and it's always going to start chugging unless
Speaker 1: there's something pushing you back, pushing you to hold you
Speaker 1: in place. Now, there's one physics fact we all i think,
Speaker 1: learned in school, which can be kind of confusing here.
Speaker 1: So we need to make a sort of obvious but
Speaker 1: important distinction. The acceleration due to gravity is the same
Speaker 1: for all falling objects near Earth's surface. That's nine point
Speaker 1: eight meters per second per second, no matter what you are,
Speaker 1: what kind of object you're talking about. But that does
Speaker 1: not mean that all objects fall at the same rate.
Speaker 1: This is obvious because of the effects of drag caused
Speaker 1: by air resistance acting on the falling object. So this
Speaker 1: is pretty obvious. When you drop a feather and a
Speaker 1: hammer side by side, obviously the hammer hits the ground first,
Speaker 1: unless say, you're on the Moon, where there is no atmosphere.
Speaker 1: And this is actually a demonstration that was put on
Speaker 1: during a moonwalk by the American astronaut David Scott in
Speaker 1: nine they were out on the Have you seen the
Speaker 1: video of this, Robert, I have, yes, Uh, it's it's impressive.
Speaker 1: There also have been some recent videos that that have
Speaker 1: been put together using a vacuum chamber, but they're also
Speaker 1: just as Uh. It's fascinating to watch because it seems
Speaker 1: it defies expectations because our expectations are based on a
Speaker 1: world of atmosphere exactly right. Yeah, and the and the
Speaker 1: vacuum chamber and on Earth works just as good because
Speaker 1: it's nothing about the gravitational properties of the Moon that
Speaker 1: make the feather fall just as fast as the hammer.
Speaker 1: It's the fact, like you say that there is no
Speaker 1: atmosphere to push up against it. Uh, no air to
Speaker 1: slow down the feather. By the way I I looked
Speaker 1: it up, it was a falcon feather. I wonder, without
Speaker 1: knowing the answer, if if there was like a committee
Speaker 1: that decided that, where they're like, what kind of feather
Speaker 1: are we sending on the mission, and someone's like, oh,
Speaker 1: it should be the turkey, and it should be it
Speaker 1: should be an American eagle. Uh, just like in basically
Speaker 1: have the same conversation. They had a song about it
Speaker 1: the dove. Uh. So anyway, if you're near Earth's surface
Speaker 1: and you're falling, gravity is going to keep accelerating you
Speaker 1: faster and faster until the drag of the atmosphere on
Speaker 1: your body, which we call air resistance, stops you from
Speaker 1: speeding up anymore. And there you level out at a
Speaker 1: top speed, and it's never gonna be an exactly perfect
Speaker 1: level top speed. You sort of approach a top speed
Speaker 1: and get within of it and then wobble up and down,
Speaker 1: and we call this terminal velocity. Now, exactly how fast
Speaker 1: terminal velocity is depends on a number of factors. It's
Speaker 1: the shape of the falling object. Like a one pound
Speaker 1: dart will fall faster than a one pound blanket, right
Speaker 1: because the blanket spreads out it catches the air, The
Speaker 1: weight of the falling object. Obviously, heavier objects have more
Speaker 1: power to overcome the air resistance forces on them. The
Speaker 1: position or orientation of the following object. So imagine you
Speaker 1: drop a plate and you could drop it flat side
Speaker 1: down or you could drop it thin side down, and
Speaker 1: that's going to make a difference. Another thing is what
Speaker 1: medium the object is falling through and how dense the
Speaker 1: medium is. For example, you can fall faster higher in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere because the gas around you is thinner. This
Speaker 1: is something that these high altitude jumpers of experience, like
Speaker 1: Felix Bomb gardner, you know, went up super high in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere and jumped and was going faster earlier in
Speaker 1: the jump, but got slowed down as the atmosphere got
Speaker 1: thicker closer to the ground. So, based on all these
Speaker 1: kinds of factors, for an adult human falling through the
Speaker 1: atmosphere with no parachute, terminal velocity is going to vary
Speaker 1: a lot. Of A common figure I've seen cited for
Speaker 1: an adult human is that terminal velocity might be somewhere
Speaker 1: around a hundred kilometers per hour, which is about fifty
Speaker 1: four meters per second, or about a hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: miles per hour. And this seems to be the case
Speaker 1: maybe if you are trying to fall as slowly as possible,
Speaker 1: say in a belly flop position, which sort of turns
Speaker 1: your body into a bio parachute, right because you try
Speaker 1: to spread out and catch as much wind as possible.
Speaker 1: But I was reading an article by Frazer Kine at
Speaker 1: Universe Today, and he claimed that the skydivers who orient
Speaker 1: their bodies like a dart so streamlined head first and
Speaker 1: so forth, can accelerate to a much higher terminal velocity
Speaker 1: of more like four hundred kilometers per hour, which is
Speaker 1: around a hundred and eleven meters per second, which is
Speaker 1: like double the speed of the belly flop orientation we
Speaker 1: were just talking about. And again, of course it varies
Speaker 1: depending on other factors about your body, your clothes and
Speaker 1: all that. Another thing that's going to vary is how
Speaker 1: far you have to fall before you reach or not reach,
Speaker 1: but approach terminal velocity. Again, this is going to vary
Speaker 1: according to all these individual factors about your body and
Speaker 1: how you're falling in all that. But I've come across
Speaker 1: some wildly different estimates. So one article I was reading
Speaker 1: in The Guardian by Ian Sample consulted Howie Weiss, who
Speaker 1: is a professor of mathematics at Penn State University, to
Speaker 1: calculate the rules, specifically for the case of Vestna Volkovich,
Speaker 1: the Serbian flight attendant who survived the like thirty three
Speaker 1: thousand footfall. According to Weiss quote, a free falling a
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty pound or fifty four woman would have
Speaker 1: a terminal velocity of about thirty eight meters per second
Speaker 1: uh and uh, and she would achieve of the speed
Speaker 1: and about seven seconds. This means that she would be
Speaker 1: falling about as fast as possible after falling for only
Speaker 1: a hundred and sixty seven meters or about five hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty feet. Other estimates for human terminal velocity takes
Speaker 1: significantly more time and distance, but suffice to say that
Speaker 1: if you fall out of an airplane at cruising altitude,
Speaker 1: there is no doubt that you will end up falling
Speaker 1: as fast as you possibly can, and it will be
Speaker 1: very fast. It might be, you know, between two hundred
Speaker 1: and four hundred kilometers per hour. An interesting side note
Speaker 1: is just some anecdotes I was reading about about skydiving
Speaker 1: that mentioned what it feels like when you approach terminal
Speaker 1: velocity on a fall like Apparently the body sensation is
Speaker 1: different from the sensation during that period of constant acceleration
Speaker 1: that we're used to in a fall. Normally, we don't
Speaker 1: ever reach terminal velocity, so we don't know what it
Speaker 1: feels like, so we think of a fall as this
Speaker 1: feeling of weightlessness, you know, the free fall feeling. But
Speaker 1: apparently once you get in your terminal velocity, I've seen
Speaker 1: 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 to this point where everything is normalized at
Speaker 1: least for a few more seconds. Well there you might.
Speaker 1: This is interesting because I sometimes feel like the words
Speaker 1: feel it that way too. But you're sort of inverting
Speaker 1: the weight less versus weighted feeling. Right Like do astronauts
Speaker 1: who are forever accelerating because they're forever in free fall?
Speaker 1: Do they feel weight less or weighted? I guess they
Speaker 1: would say weight less, but yeah, you could also think
Speaker 1: of it as like you feel weight less when your
Speaker 1: body is supported by something, or if you just stop
Speaker 1: to contemplate gravity, you can start feeling rather weighted. You know.
Speaker 1: It's because again, these forces are acting on us at
Speaker 1: all all times. We just are used to a certain level.
Speaker 1: As we brought up a minute ago, we know from
Speaker 1: lots of human experience that a fall from just like
Speaker 1: ten ft can easily kill a person depending on how
Speaker 1: they land, and in those cases you wouldn't be traveling
Speaker 1: anywhere near your terminal velocity. So obviously hitting the ground
Speaker 1: from a fall of a few hundred meters or more
Speaker 1: is going to cause massive trauma to the body and
Speaker 1: will almost always result in death. But like, how what
Speaker 1: actually happens here in the body? Well, since falling from
Speaker 1: a great height applies massive impact force to your body
Speaker 1: when you hit the ground, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different ways for the fall to kill you, but apparently
Speaker 1: the most common fatal injury is caused by a fall
Speaker 1: are arterial damage due to the breaking of the spine.
Speaker 1: Sorry to get graphic here for a second, but this
Speaker 1: is just for the sake of specificity. Uh. The article
Speaker 1: in the Guardian quote Sean Hughes, who's a professor of
Speaker 1: surgery at Imperial College London, who says the quote, most
Speaker 1: people who fall from a great height die because they
Speaker 1: fracture their spine near the top and so transsect the
Speaker 1: a order which carries blood out of the heart. And
Speaker 1: so obviously that pretty clear why that would kill you.
Speaker 1: That that's very bad. Alright, so we have we have
Speaker 1: we've described the problem here of falling from a great
Speaker 1: height and and and by necessity impacting the ground. We're
Speaker 1: gonna take a break. When we come back, we're gonna
Speaker 1: discuss what the survival tactics actually are, you know too,
Speaker 1: and the extent to which you can actually deploy them
Speaker 1: during free fall. Thank all right, we're back. So obviously,
Speaker 1: any fall from a great height is going to be
Speaker 1: really dangerous and it would probably kill anybody. So these
Speaker 1: high altitude survival stories are very unlikely, and you should
Speaker 1: not get it in your head that you can like
Speaker 1: jump out of an airplane and survive. But there are
Speaker 1: some factors that appear to increase a person's odds of
Speaker 1: surviving a great fall out of the sky, at least
Speaker 1: based on the anecdotes we have, so let's talk about them.
Speaker 1: I wanted to refer to a couple of pretty good
Speaker 1: articles I found on this subject, sort of collecting the
Speaker 1: opinions of experts over the years on long free falls.
Speaker 1: One was a two thousand article in Popular Mechanics by
Speaker 1: Dan Keppel. One was a more recent article in NPR
Speaker 1: by Paul Chisholm and the Paul Chisholm article and NPR
Speaker 1: spoke to an associate professor of physics Southeastern Louisiana State
Speaker 1: University named Rhet Alan, who pointed out that obviously, human
Speaker 1: survival of long free falls is not something you can
Speaker 1: run real life experiments on. You can't push people out
Speaker 1: of airplanes to test it out, So we can only
Speaker 1: reason based on sort of hypothetical scenarios and by analyzing
Speaker 1: the anecdotes of people who actually survive accidental falls. So
Speaker 1: we're sort of, you know, it's kind of like digging
Speaker 1: up fossils. It's like we're stuck with whatever data happened
Speaker 1: to have already you know, been available to us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it's also it's kind of a it's very much
Speaker 1: like it's a modern problem that's presented itself, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, we've barely had airplanes and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: into to a certain extent, we've barely had had had
Speaker 1: the sort of massive structures or even access to some
Speaker 1: of the massive features to to engage in these types
Speaker 1: of falls to begin with. Sure, all right, so first question,
Speaker 1: how to fall? Capital points out that you're you're actually
Speaker 1: probably better off falling out of a plane lane than
Speaker 1: falling out of a tall building from a height of
Speaker 1: more than a few hundred feet, because you're gonna reach
Speaker 1: similarly high speeds either way. But if you fall out
Speaker 1: out of a building, you don't really have any time, right,
Speaker 1: You're gonna hit the ground pretty much before you know it,
Speaker 1: Whereas if you fall out of the sky a few
Speaker 1: thousand meters up, you may actually have more time to
Speaker 1: plan your descent, like the figures I was I was
Speaker 1: looking at, or that if you were to jump, if
Speaker 1: you jump out of a plane at ten thousand feet,
Speaker 1: you basically have one minute, uh, not counting you know
Speaker 1: any you know, types of shoots you would deploy, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But you basically have a minute of of of of descent.
Speaker 1: Now there are some downsides there too, though. Jumping out
Speaker 1: of 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 rider 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. All 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 resistance 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 it will also increase your surface area.
Speaker 1: So as you increase your surface area, you increase your
Speaker 1: drag and function more like a parachute. So you just
Speaker 1: have to look into the math of which of these
Speaker 1: factors 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 notoriously great followers. They can fall from
Speaker 1: great heights and and suffer no damage. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: quote from JBS Holliday in writing in who wrote, you
Speaker 1: can drop a mouse down a thousand yard mine 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 or have more flexible skeletons,
Speaker 1: more relaxed muscle tone us and a higher proportion of
Speaker 1: subcutaneous fat which helps protect internal organs. Well, this, this, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, matches up with research I've done in the
Speaker 1: past on just sort of the durability of children. You know,
Speaker 1: especially as parents, we often think of of of young
Speaker 1: children as being just you know, highly vulnerable, and in
Speaker 1: certain respects they are, but they are also uh, they
Speaker 1: have evolved to be durable at that stage as well,
Speaker 1: and to you know, to survive falls and stumbles and
Speaker 1: the you know, the various kind of hazards that they
Speaker 1: are inevitably going to encounter at that age. Also, this
Speaker 1: feature of falling might be obvious, but if you can
Speaker 1: somehow slow yourself down with some kind of parachute like object,
Speaker 1: that's good. Yeah, And that's something that comes up in
Speaker 1: some of the accounts I was looking at, because a
Speaker 1: lot of the accounts do involve uh, sky divers, people
Speaker 1: who of course putting themselves in a position like this
Speaker 1: on a regular basis, you know, actually falling through the sky.
Speaker 1: And you know, most of the time they you know,
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 is 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, that would be where you
Speaker 1: would want to land. And this is why landing in
Speaker 1: a net helps or something. You know, the net, like
Speaker 1: the tension of it absorbs some of the energy of
Speaker 1: your fall and it slows down your deceleration or you
Speaker 1: decelerate over a longer distance as the net stretches when
Speaker 1: it catches you. So if you could actually aim for
Speaker 1: any enormous circus tent like that would be ideal, not
Speaker 1: I mean, And if there happened to be a net
Speaker 1: 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 differ front levels instead of stopping at
Speaker 1: the ground all at once, you slow your fall. You
Speaker 1: kind of put your your your injury on installment plan. 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 as best. Again, you want, you know,
Speaker 1: a softer thing to crash into too slow to increase
Speaker 1: your deceleration distance. Hay stacks are apparently good, and then
Speaker 1: hitting the roof of some types of human structures can
Speaker 1: be better than hitting solid ground. Specifically if you think
Speaker 1: that 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 roope would be ideal as well.
Speaker 1: You know, to bring up a pro wrestling example here,
Speaker 1: anyone who's watched the pro wrestling has probably seen somebody
Speaker 1: fall off of something through a table, through something like
Speaker 1: a folding table. It makes an impressive noise. It looks
Speaker 1: impressive to watch this falling body, uh, you know destroy
Speaker 1: a table, sometimes two or three tables on the way down.
Speaker 1: But of course ultimately that is breaking the fall of
Speaker 1: the wrestler and hurt the more to just go straight
Speaker 1: to the ground. Yeah. The accounts I've heard of from
Speaker 1: pro wrestlers of them taking bumps where they say, jump
Speaker 1: off of a top rope and land just on their
Speaker 1: back at the ringside like that has been Like those
Speaker 1: have been the scarier bumps they've described where they talk
Speaker 1: about their like feeling their organs like jostle around inside
Speaker 1: their body. That is not a feeling I want to feel. Right. So,
Speaker 1: in the same way, if you're falling off the top rope,
Speaker 1: you should aim for the tables and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: even if it's not completely cafe. And if you're jumping
Speaker 1: out of the if you're falling out of that plane,
Speaker 1: you should aim for the thatched roof for the or
Speaker 1: even the the the the greenhouse, or you know, whatever
Speaker 1: is better than just hitting just the you know, an
Speaker 1: open pavement area. Yeah, exactly. Again, what you want to
Speaker 1: think is something that will make you not stop all
Speaker 1: at once. Now, a big question here is actually about water.
Speaker 1: There's disagreement about weather water is a good choice. Hitting
Speaker 1: water at high speed is not like jumping off the
Speaker 1: high dive. Hitting water at high speed will still cause
Speaker 1: massive injuries. It's often said that hitting water after a
Speaker 1: great fall isn't that much different from hitting concrete. Right. However,
Speaker 1: I will say, do a belly flop off the high dive,
Speaker 1: or actually don't do a belly flop off the high
Speaker 1: but just do a normal belly flop off of a
Speaker 1: normal diving board or cannonball. What have you feel that
Speaker 1: smack of water against your body and uh, and you know,
Speaker 1: get a sense of what some of the physics we're
Speaker 1: talking about here, because that that that smack can sting
Speaker 1: and we're talking a fall of like you know, four
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? Uh. 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 of the maybe not belly flop,
Speaker 1: but somehow distribute it 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 divers
Speaker 1: landing stance feet together, heels 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 pencil. So that's like feet first,
Speaker 1: knifelike kind of entry. But obviously this doesn't always work.
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, Alan points out that for
Speaker 1: some reason, some studies have found that human bodies seem
Speaker 1: to be generally more tolerant of G forces in particular directions,
Speaker 1: like NASA figured this out during some of their experiments
Speaker 1: with test pilots in the nineteen sixties, that the body
Speaker 1: seems more tolerant of G forces pushing from the front
Speaker 1: of the body to the back. This is referred to
Speaker 1: and you sort of picture this. This is referred to
Speaker 1: as eyeballs in G force as opposed to eyeballs out
Speaker 1: up or down. Other types of forces such as eyeballs
Speaker 1: down are more traumatic to the body. So I hadn't
Speaker 1: really thought about this, but but it makes sense when
Speaker 1: you when you look at various um like especially like
Speaker 1: supersonic aircraft. You may, of course you're gonna have a
Speaker 1: pilot position where they need to have a forward facing
Speaker 1: view out of the airplane, but you may have other
Speaker 1: roles in the plane that do not require that, or
Speaker 1: even you know, do not allow a direct forward facing
Speaker 1: view out of the plane. And in those cases you
Speaker 1: still of the Uh, this particular individual will still be
Speaker 1: facing forward, Yeah, because apparently the body is more tolerant
Speaker 1: of g forces that way. Uh So, given this consideration,
Speaker 1: it might seem like the best way for your body
Speaker 1: to absorb impact would be to land on your back
Speaker 1: face up. But there's a problem with that, which is
Speaker 1: that it seems like this would be more likely to
Speaker 1: generate a harder impact on the head, which is exactly
Speaker 1: what you don't want to do, to say nothing of
Speaker 1: the spine. I mean, it's almost like we're not designed
Speaker 1: for this kind of impact at all, exactly. You know,
Speaker 1: it's it's bad no matter how you do it. Uh.
Speaker 1: The one last source they look at here is the
Speaker 1: Chisholm Mentions, a study by the Highway Safety Research Institute
Speaker 1: from n 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 land accept 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. Yeah. I used
Speaker 1: to be a big Kids in the Hall of fan
Speaker 1: just because it was you know, it was on TV
Speaker 1: all the time, so I was always watching Kids in
Speaker 1: the Hall, Kids in the Hall. Oh yeah, it's some
Speaker 1: some wonderful sketches in there. But there was a particular
Speaker 1: sketch from season one titled The Odds, during which a
Speaker 1: bunch of sky divers are encountering just a series of
Speaker 1: fatal parachute mishaps, one after the other, and and finally, Uh,
Speaker 1: Bruce McCulloch's character is the last one left on the
Speaker 1: plane that that hasn't jumped, and he's there having a
Speaker 1: discussion with Mark McKinney's character, and Bruce's character begins discussing
Speaker 1: the odds of this series of terrible jumps occurring the
Speaker 1: way they occurred, and he finally reaches an illogical conclusion. So, uh,
Speaker 1: Bruce's character, you know, says, says says, Uh says, alright, 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 these these odds
Speaker 1: would make it just just insurmountable. And then Mark's character
Speaker 1: tells him what would be roughly sixty three million to one,
Speaker 1: and Bruce's character says, quote, not good enough. If these parachutes,
Speaker 1: I've been watching them defy the odds all day. I'm
Speaker 1: jumping without one. And then he takes off his parachute
Speaker 1: and he says, he asked, what are the odds of
Speaker 1: a guy jumping from ten thousand feet and hitting the
Speaker 1: pavement running? And Mark tells him two to one, and
Speaker 1: then Bruce says, good, I'm off, and he said I'm
Speaker 1: feeling lucky, and he jumps and he's saying it's working,
Speaker 1: it's working, it's working, and then there's a splat sound. Right,
Speaker 1: But so so I have to say I've never given
Speaker 1: the scenario a lot of scrutiny, but I do think
Speaker 1: of it every single time someone discusses hitting the ground
Speaker 1: running on the topic. I imagine um, Bruce McCulloch, um,
Speaker 1: you know, plummeting to his death with this optimism in mind.
Speaker 1: And I think that the kid is kind of a
Speaker 1: fun send up of our basic inability to comprehend large
Speaker 1: numbers or or the odds of any given scenario. Well,
Speaker 1: it makes me think about that old thing where it's like,
Speaker 1: if you're in a in a plane that's going down
Speaker 1: or an elevator that's falling, if you jump at the
Speaker 1: last second, then you'll be fine. Yeah, that's not how
Speaker 1: it works, isn't. No, not not at all. And by
Speaker 1: the way I look to see, I was thinking, well,
Speaker 1: Kids in the Hall has been out a while, and
Speaker 1: people are always doing you know, kind of interesting like
Speaker 1: physics based blog post or even full fledged papers exploring
Speaker 1: a particular topic. And I haven't seen anybody, you know,
Speaker 1: uh myth bust uh this particular sketch. Yet maybe I'm wrong.
Speaker 1: If I am wrong, someone please send me in some
Speaker 1: myth busting on this. But I think the basic idea is, uh,
Speaker 1: hitting the ground running would not work, And this line
Speaker 1: of thinking does. Following like you said, with the idea
Speaker 1: of well, could you jump out of a crashing plane
Speaker 1: right before it hits the ground. And so five. And
Speaker 1: this question, these questions in general, tend to ignore the
Speaker 1: fact that you're not merely a board of falling plane.
Speaker 1: You're falling with the plane, and if you jump off
Speaker 1: the plane, you're still falling at the same pace, with
Speaker 1: the same acceleration. Especially at high speeds. There's virtually no
Speaker 1: scenario in which the jump is going to make, you know,
Speaker 1: a huge difference. But when I was looking around about this,
Speaker 1: I did run across another account of survival from a
Speaker 1: fall of a great height. Uh, similar scenario to some
Speaker 1: of the ones we've discussed already. Uh. It was the
Speaker 1: it's the story of two thousand six survival story of
Speaker 1: a twenty five year old experienced, experienced jumper who encountered
Speaker 1: a series of shoot malfunctions from a fifteen thousand foot jump.
Speaker 1: And there there's an interview with this guy on Vice
Speaker 1: Uh and basically he tried everything. Um, you know, he
Speaker 1: had a very logical fall. You know, it's where it's
Speaker 1: like he's deploying the first shoot doesn't work, Okay, deploying
Speaker 1: the second shoot does not work, and uh, and then
Speaker 1: he makes a rushed logical peace with death at that
Speaker 1: point where he's like, Okay, I've done everything, I can do,
Speaker 1: nothing else I can do. I'm I'm probably gonna die,
Speaker 1: And he essentially goes limp and falls and impacts in
Speaker 1: a small BlackBerry bush, like not a huge bush, but
Speaker 1: you know, a fairly small one by his description, ends
Speaker 1: up shattering his left foot like really badly, but he survived.
Speaker 1: He didn't hit the ground vertically but and so so
Speaker 1: the impact was you know, deflected through his body. And
Speaker 1: in the Vice interview he recommended his recommendations for falling,
Speaker 1: which he said ultimately he he didn't have any logical
Speaker 1: um strategy in mind. He just was like, Okay, I
Speaker 1: guess I'm hitting the ground. But he said in retrospect
Speaker 1: he would say don't tense up, you know, in the
Speaker 1: same and then we see this in discussion of car
Speaker 1: crashes as well, like like don't tense your body for
Speaker 1: the impact if if you at all have any say
Speaker 1: so in this and then also land in a shrub
Speaker 1: or a tree if you can. We falls in line
Speaker 1: with some of the advice and uh analysis we looked
Speaker 1: at already. Yeah, well, I'd say top lane takeaway today,
Speaker 1: Don't jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Don't
Speaker 1: fall out of an airplane without a parachute if you
Speaker 1: can help it. If you are in this scenario, see
Speaker 1: if you can land in like some snow and try
Speaker 1: not to land on your head. Right. And as for
Speaker 1: the kids in the Hall method, I guess that you
Speaker 1: know the jury is still out, but that's probably not
Speaker 1: going to be your best strategy either. All right, So
Speaker 1: there you have it. Uh. The fun thing about this
Speaker 1: episode is that I know we have some skydivers out there.
Speaker 1: We have to have some skydivers. We've heard from skydivers before.
Speaker 1: All right, Well now it's really they're time to shine
Speaker 1: because I wanna you know, we want to hear anything
Speaker 1: and just about your your your thoughts on this particular topic. Certainly,
Speaker 1: if you know anybody who has a survival story like
Speaker 1: this or app one yourself to share, we would love
Speaker 1: to hear that. But just in general, like your your
Speaker 1: thoughts on on the you know, the feeling, the sensation
Speaker 1: of of of descending through the air at these these
Speaker 1: great speeds and with these great great distances. What is
Speaker 1: that like? We would love to hear from you. What
Speaker 1: does it feel like to hit terminal velocity when you freefall? Yeah,
Speaker 1: where do you fall? In on our various descriptions of
Speaker 1: you know, feeling weighted versus feeling witless. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's
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Speaker 1: us wherever you have the power to do so, and
Speaker 1: make sure you have subscribed not only to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind, but hey, the other podcast that Joe
Speaker 1: and I also hosts, which is called Invention. That's one
Speaker 1: episode a week. Each episode is a different invention, or
Speaker 1: at least an episode on a particular invention or a
Speaker 1: sort of a train of thought with inventions, looking at
Speaker 1: basically human techno history, all this weird technology that humans
Speaker 1: uh leave behind and what it says about us, what
Speaker 1: it's says about human existence before the advent of these
Speaker 1: different inventions. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio
Speaker 1: producers Seth Nicholas Johnson and Maya Cole. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 1: episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,
Speaker 1: or just to say hello, you can email us at
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