Domain: greenharbor.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to greenharbor.com.
Comments · 17
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Re:Then let's test these next
A few more here:
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/unlucky.html
e.g.Tang Lee Ping Kuala Lumpur: In February of 2001 Tang Lee Ping of Malaysia fell 1,500 meters after her main and back-up parachutes failed to open. She woke up three hours later in a nearby hospital. Her injuries were minor (only bruises). She attributed her survival to God and a soft landing area.
Bruises only! I think 1500 metres is enough distance to get to "normal" terminal velocity.
And: http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/leeds.htmlI walked away without so much as a scratch. Following this incident I must have made over a hundred free falls and static line jumps without incident.
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Re:Then let's test these next
A few more here:
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/unlucky.html
e.g.Tang Lee Ping Kuala Lumpur: In February of 2001 Tang Lee Ping of Malaysia fell 1,500 meters after her main and back-up parachutes failed to open. She woke up three hours later in a nearby hospital. Her injuries were minor (only bruises). She attributed her survival to God and a soft landing area.
Bruises only! I think 1500 metres is enough distance to get to "normal" terminal velocity.
And: http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/leeds.htmlI walked away without so much as a scratch. Following this incident I must have made over a hundred free falls and static line jumps without incident.
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Re:five meters deep
Actually if there isn't a high chance of thick fresh snow or a suitable amount of water I might actually pick a landing area and landing orientation that would kill me very very fast
;).FWIW, many skydivers have survived failed chutes - but most had the failed chute slowing them down.
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/unlucky.html
From the first account water may not be such a bad option - it sure is better than concrete
;).This is nuts though:
Fort Bragg, NC: In the summer of 1977, Michael Cox was a Radio-Teletype operator in the 82nd Airborne division. Jumping with a heavy equipment bag from 1,200 feet out of a C-130, Cox hit the side of the plane and spun as he fell, which prevented his parachute from opening properly. With his parachute streaming uselessly above him, he hit the ground in a sandy area. He was knocked out for about 45 minutes, but recovered well enough to hike back to the mustering point where the company commander ordered him to do fifty push-ups for arriving late. Cox collapsed and was taken to the emergency room where he was found to have a neck fracture. He recovered and jumped again about six weeks later.
Doing push-ups with a neck fracture...
Tough/lucky/blessed lady:
Kuala Lumpur: In February of 2001 Tang Lee Ping of Malaysia fell 1,500 meters after her main and back-up parachutes failed to open. She woke up three hours later in a nearby hospital. Her injuries were minor (only bruises). She attributed her survival to God and a soft landing area.
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Re:Not really
There are a lot of records of people who have fallen at terminal velocity and survived, and even walked away from it, if by a lot you mean one in a thousand or so. I enjoy telling all of this to my students when I teach them about drag forces and terminal velocity in intro physics which is why I have a good patter for it. If you look up "g force" and "terminal velocity" on wikipedia they have cross references of some of the people who have survived, by name, but during WW II there were a lot more that didn't get recorded -- people who fell or were shot out of planes at 10,000 to 16,000 feet without a chute but managed to walk away.
There is also a section in the Survival Guide (humor) book that you'll see in bookstores from time to time on this, and articles such as http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/4344036 that again cross-reference previous occurrences. Documented no-airplane instances of survival are pretty rare, but there are a few that stand up to investigative test, and even a website devoted to this one subject (of course): http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffresearch.html
Anyway, Enjoy. These sites between them give you most of what is known about what is after all a very unlikely thing. Don't forget your trench coat and "Prove You're No Terrorist -- Fly Naked!" tank-top tee shirt and g-string for your next flight! Just remember that the g-string does not, in the end, help much with the terminal g-force (and what that final pa-da-pam, I'll stop:-).
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Unplanned freefall
The folks at Free Fall Research have a more optimistic view
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Re:The Man Who Rode the ThunderYour account does not jibe with his book. Some more free falls:
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Free Fall? No Problem!Source
Admit it: You want to be the sole survivor of an airline disaster. You aren't looking for a disaster to happen, but if it does, you see yourself coming through it. I'm here to tell you that you're not out of touch with reality--you can do it. Sure, you'll take a few hits, and I'm not saying there won't be some sweaty flashbacks later on, but you'll make it. You'll sit up in your hospital bed and meet the press. Refreshingly, you will keep God out of your public comments, knowing that it's unfair to sing His praises when all of your dead fellow-passengers have no platform from which to offer an alternative view.
Let's say your jet blows apart at 35,000 feet. You exit the aircraft, and you begin to descend independently. Now what? First of all, you're starting off a full mile higher than Everest, so after a few gulps of disappointing air you're going to black out. This is not a bad thing. If you have ever tried to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you know what I mean. This brief respite from the ambient fear and chaos will come to an end when you wake up at about 15,000 feet. Here begins the final phase of your descent, which will last about a minute. It is a time of planning and preparation. Look around you. What equipment is available? None? Are you sure? Look carefully. Perhaps a shipment of folded parachutes was in the cargo hold, and the blast opened the box and scattered them. One of these just might be within reach. Grab it, put it on, and hit the silk. You're sitting pretty.
Other items can be helpful as well. Let nature be your guide. See how yon maple seed gently wafts to earth on gossamer wings. Look around for a proportionate personal vehicle--some large, flat, aerodynamically suitable piece of wreckage. Mount it and ride, cowboy! Remember: molecules are your friends. You want a bunch of surface-area molecules hitting a bunch of atmospheric molecules in order to reduce your rate of acceleration.
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The Man Who Rode the Thunder
In 1960 William Rankin ejected from his F8U Crusader jet at 48,000 feet and his parachute was ripped away in the jet stream. He traveled 150 miles and didn't come down for an hour. There are more stories like it here: http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffreading.html
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Reminds me of...
..an entertaining read I bumped into a couple of months back, describing how to survive a freefall from 35'000 feet...
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/carkeet.html
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Re:Fifty foot fall
These are 2 examples that I knew from other sources (before Internet if you can imagine) Vesna Vulovic was a stewardess on a Yugoslav DC 9 jet airliner that blew up in January of 1972 (probably as the result of a terrorist bomb). She fell more than 33,000 feet in the wreckage of the plane, which hit a snow-covered slope. The only survivor, she was badly injured and was paralyzed from the waist down, but later recovered and now can walk. On Christmas Eve of 1971, a commercial airliner over Peru was struck by lightning and broke up during a storm. A teenage girl, Juliane Koepcke, fell two miles, still strapped in her seat. She survived, but her ordeal had just begun. Despite a broken collarbone and other injuries, she walked for 11 days through the Amazon rain forest and finally found help. Her story has been the subject of two films, the most recent being a Werner Herzog documentary called Wings of Hope. from http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/wreckage.html
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Re:A 50 footer?
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/ffallers.html
A whole family of unlikely survivors. -
Re:surviving falls"Now, some people theorize that instead of just impacting into the ground, you could land at an angle and "roll" in order to transfer the kinetic energy into a harmless direction. Except that if you think about this physically, it's even worse than just impacting directly into the ground. Now, instead of removing your momentum of fall, you have to redirect it to a perpendicular direction. This takes 40% more force than simply stopping the motion, and would probably result in your entire body exploding like a water balloon, not just your legs."
Well tell that to this guy:
"...Lt. I.M. Chisov was a Russian airman whose Ilyushin IL-4 bomber was attacked by German fighters in January of 1942. Falling nearly 22,000 feet, he hit the edge of a snow-covered ravine and rolled to the bottom. He was badly hurt but survived..."
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Re:surviving falls
Arch Deal -- Cypress Gardens, FL: In June of 1975, Arch Deal made a skydive as part of a promotional stunt for Channel 8 News. His parachute failed to open and he fell 3,000 feet into "loose soil" in an orange grove. Spectators found him there alive thirty minutes later. Deal returned to skydiving and has made 4,500 jumps since his accident, many of them as head of the Miller Brewing Company's skydiving team.
http://www.greenharbor.com/fffolder/unlucky.html
Better luck than this fellow...
With his parachute streaming uselessly above him, he hit the ground in a sandy area. He was knocked out for about 45 minutes, but recovered well enough to hike back to the mustering point where the company commander ordered him to do fifty push-ups for arriving late. Cox collapsed and was taken to the emergency room where he was found to have a neck fracture. He recovered and jumped again about six weeks later. -
Re:Mistake?
List of some survivors.
Quite a number survived with rather minor injuries. -
Hollywood rescue: Yes.
The Freefall Research pages have information on people who have survived various mishaps while skydiving (intentionally or otherwise.)
This includes the pilot of a WWII bomber without a chute who caught a crewmate with a parachute, as well as a pilot of a biplane chasing down and rescuing (by means of crashing him into a wing) a freefaller with no parachute.
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Re:Not the first time . . .
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Re:parachute necessary?I have always wondered if there were any examples (probably from war) of people bailing over the ocean with no/unopened parachute and surviving.
You are looking for people like Vesna Vulovic. She is the record-holder, if you want to say so.
She is the only survivor of a plane that broke apart in 33,000 ft (terrorists...) and landed in the tail of the plane on the snow-covered slope.
The page lists over cases of people with what seems to be armies of guardian angels.