How to fall 35,000 feet—and survive

Maybe I worry too much. Maybe I keep thinking about the
Christmas bomber with explosive powder in his pants. Perhaps visions of the shoe bomber lighting his fuse shakes me. But when I saw this article in Popular Mechanics, I had to laugh, or cry. It seemed too perfect a fit with my mood.

I’ve given up on TSA at the airport. I’m disgusted that I have virtually strip to get on a plane these days. My mind is getting numb the more I learn about how little the new $150,000 scanners can see. Maybe riding wreckage offers more security.

I just heard that the chances of being killed by a terrorist in the U.S. are less than the chances of being struck by lightning. Hummm. Probably about the same as the chances of surviving a free-fall from 35,000 feet.

Here are some clips from the February 2010 issue of Popular Mechanics. Go to the full article to learn the specifics.

You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?

You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.

Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.

Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.

Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extra­ordinarily slim, but at this point you’ve got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page—an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet.

The article goes on about body position, terminal velocity, water landings, death statistics and stories of survival. The piece ends with this paragraph:

Or, by now, you’re wide awake, and the aircraft’s wheels have touched safely down on the tarmac. You understand the odds of any kind of accident on a commercial flight are slimmer than slim and that you will likely never have to use this information. But as a courtesy to the next passenger, consider leaving your copy of this guide in the seat-back pocket.

Photo from www.Fiordland.org.nz

Tagged as: airlines, airport security, crash landings