18 ms·
I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)
- robswc 4y agoSorta related... I just remember having my mind absolutely blown when I learned about terminal velocity. It never made sense to me as a kid how small things could fall from relatively greater heights yet humans couldn't do even a few stories.
- merely-unlikely 4y ago“To the mouse and any smaller animal gravity presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force” https://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRightSize.pdf https://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRig...
- robswc 4y agoExactly! Still blows my mind to this day. Maybe because "falling" is such a simple thing and experienced by almost all land animals... and just changing a few properties can mean the difference of life or death. After learning about it as a kid, I thought "if I ever get in a plane crash, I just need to grab stuff to fall less fast and maybe I'll survive." (which is not realistic at all but you know, lol)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- NikolaNovak 4y agoThe whole description is wordy but astonishing. It is strange that the part that strikes me the most though is this one: "The Coast Guard amphibian gained altitude and flew off. (I learned later that he headed for a squadron of minesweepers that was returning to the United States from a tour of the Western Pacific. He was unable to tune to their radio frequency for communications. But this ingenious pilot lowered a wire from his aircraft and dragged it across the bow of the minesweeper, the USS Embattle. The minesweeper captain understood the plea, and veered off at top speed in my direction.)" That is such a fascinating operational ingenuity by the pilot and the captain, I am thoroughly impressed!
- Test0129 4y agoI was under the impression that for non-surfaced subs the only way to communicate them was to fly close to the surface and lower a boom into the water. Is that not the case?
- idontwantthis 4y agoMinesweepers are surface vessels
- Test0129 4y agoOh good point. For some reason my mind was fixated on submarines lol.
- crdrost 4y agoThese aren't subs, they are ships. I would imagine the plane circled overhead at a low altitude several times, tried to get their attention, kept going away and seeing if they would follow, kept going back when they didn't. And people on the ship were probably looking up being like, “what's his deal?” A “shot across the bows” is a colloquial expression for a warning demanding imminent action. The idea was that long ago if you couldn't communicate with some other ship, your last ditch effort to tell them to stop “or else” was to fire a cannonball over the nose (the bow) of the ship, so that you do not damage the ship but they would definitely see it and know you mean business. So I imagine someone on this plane using the colloquial expression was just like “dammit! Follow us!! What more of a shot across the bows do you need?!” And someone else was like “you mean a literal one? I have some cable here, you drag that a few meters above the deck I bet it will make a terrible noise.” or something.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thrdbndndn 4y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480334
- dang 4y agoThanks! Macroexpanded: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480334 - Oct 2017 (246 comments)
- whoisjuan 4y agoStill not as impressive as Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant who holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 m (33,330 ft; 6.31 mi) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87
- a4isms 4y agoThanks for the link, although I believe we're now in a place where "relative impressiveness" is all-but-meaningless. These are all impressive stories, and trying to figure out which one is more impressive is a little like sitting in a barbershop trying to figure out who is the greatest boxer that ever lived. My contribution to impressive feats of survival bailing out of an airplane is this story of a WWII ball turret gunner who survived a fall from his bomber without a parachute: https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/03/04/during-ww2-an-american-pilot-fell-20000-feet-without-a-parachute-before-smashing-through-the-glass-roof-of-a-train-station-he-survived-and-lived-to-82/ https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/03/04/during-ww2-an-amer... I think there are other such WWII stories, I seem to recall someone who fell into an evergreen forest in winter and credited the snow-laden trees for his survival.
- aliqot 4y agoDicky Ecklund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicky_Eklund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicky_Eklund
- a4isms 4y ago"Any time we talking boxers, East Coast Elites gotta bring up Dicky Eklund. Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, that's all you hear. Stop with your Dicky Eklund, everybody know it be George Chuvalo!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chuvalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chuvalo
- jrumbut 4y agoWhere is the quote from? Sounds familiar.
- a4isms 4y agoPairs nicely with the story of bailing out of an SR-71 Blackbird: https://theaviationgeekclub.com/sr-71-pilot-explains-how-he-survived-to-his-blackbird-disintegration-at-a-speed-of-mach-3-2/ https://theaviationgeekclub.com/sr-71-pilot-explains-how-he-... Recent HN discussion (including links to prior discussions): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31641716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31641716
- hsnewman 4y ago
- larrik 4y agoAre you serious? How long do you need this title to be?
- Jtsummers 4y agoThere is a long standing tradition on HN to complain about titles that don't totally and completely accurately capture the message of the article, such that the article is a mere 1000 word bit of fluff to the tweet-sized message itself. Any title short of that measure is clickbait or just wrong. Best option is to ignore them.
- mikestew 4y agoCaptain Pedantic[0] also seems to be under the illusion that the title is exclusionary. Quite the contrary: many, many people can fall from 15K feet altitude and live, and the title will be just as accurate. [0] Kidding aside, I take it to be just a poorly-executed attempt at humor.
- kube-system 4y agoNo, they typically keep their spacecraft much warmer.
- googlryas 4y agoIf you're going to be pedantic, at least be correct. "Absolute zero" is basically always referring to temperature, and space is not absolute zero. You're probably thinking of zero g. And in any case, zero g isn't even pedantically correct because you're still in Earth's gravitational field, so it should really be something like zero g-forces.
- trelane 4y agoYep. And not even absolue zero is so absolute.[0] Zero gravity? Then why are you orbiting? [0] https://www.quantum-munich.de/119947/Negative-Absolute-Temperatures https://www.quantum-munich.de/119947/Negative-Absolute-Tempe...
- rootusrootus 4y agoThis happened in 1963. Planes had only been flying for 60 years at that point; it really is pretty amazing how quickly we progressed on technology during those early years. We still fly 737s, which are descended from a design that first flew in 1967. As well as the C130, which was part of this story. And don't get me started on B-52s, which are even older. We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades.
- vuln 4y agoThe U-2 was 1955-1957 still flying today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_U-2
- ISL 4y ago> We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades. That's because the seminal work rapidly evolved into something that's good-enough, and in some cases, close to optimal. If you look around, wherever you're sitting, you'll find plenty of other human-engineered objects from a similar design-trajectory. My coffee mug looks a whole lot like cups from Mesopotamia and earlier.
- soperj 4y agoOn the other hand snowshoes though look nothing like snowshoes from 50 years ago.
- djmips 4y ago'nothing like' is quite the hyperbole - but yes even airplanes and computers are quite a bit more advanced than F-8 Crusaders and Whirlwind machines of 1955. Probably at least as much more than snowshoe advances. It's just the basics are all still there.
- djmips 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- michael_fine 4y agoIn a story of insane luck (and unluck!), the craziest part is definitely this " He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."
- throw827474737 4y agoWow.. so much bad luck (the original failure, ejection failure, parachute failure) countered by that much luck (not hitting the plane during "manual" eject, not bleeding to death because havin his spleen removed 4 years earlier) ..amazing unbelievable story with some good end :)
- cdelsolar 4y agoi didn't understand something. he said impact with the plane tail will usually kill someone during a manual eject, but why? the plane and the person are going at the same speed at first?
- suzzer99 4y agoUntil the air catches the person and slows them down much faster than the aerodynamic and much heavier (attached to the plane) tail fin.
- bbojan 4y agoThe airplane is dense and very aerodynamic. We would say it has a high ballistic coefficient [1]. The pilot is light would leave the cockpit flat or even bent over, which is a very non-aerodynamic shape. His ballistic coefficient would be low. He would decelerate quickly, and the tail would catch up with him and slam him from behind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_coefficient https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballistic_coefficient
- tunesmith 4y agoIt's why it was pretty brilliant that he skewed the plane.
- djmips 4y agoI remember reading stories written like this when I was a child called Drama In Real Life - in Reader's Digest.
- bentt 4y agoTotally! It even has the same cadence. I wouldn't be surprised if this was in there at one point.
- soegaard 4y agoHere is the amazing story of a controlled ejection from a Danish F16: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4vKMsUvpE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hz4vKMsUvpE
- londons_explore 4y agoThere were a lot of technical failures here... I wonder if OP was very unlucky, or if perhaps many of the rarely used bits of safety equipment perhaps aren't as well designed and robust as they ought to be...
- londons_explore 4y agoI assume the failed automatic cut-off switch was in the tanker... If so, upon a refuelling the day before which caused a flame-out and loss of a plane, there is no way they should have been reusing that same tanker until the root cause was understood. There could have been other causes, like a bad batch of fuel (could easily cause a flameout), debris in the fuel, water in the fuel, a subtle leak in the connector, something that causes foaming of the fuel, etc. Exception: A major war where risking loss of a few more planes and people is worth it to avoid missing a military maneuver that cannot be delayed.
- stall84 4y agoIncredible find.. As a pilot, lifelong aviation freak.. being in (nowhere near as 'unlucky') somewhat similar situations (running out of fuel in midair .. being trapped in monterey marine layer suddenly before instrument trained) there is definitely this inexplicable ability or pursuit of the ability to just keep trying.. Notice the author always went to the 'next thing'.. when his primary chute didn't open .. he spent the free-fall time not on looking out at the ground coming up at him, but looking up toward the tangle, trying to shake it free.. Always trying something else after the previous attempt failed. Great story
- londons_explore 4y agoAirbags in cars self-test themselves every time you start the engine. They test all the sensors and electrics (including the explosive igniter). I would hope ejector seats do the same. If so, the fault must be with the mechanical part. But OP does not describe the cabin filling with dense white smoke as you'd expect from a rocket propelled ejector seat. That tells me someone made a major design mistake with the seat... and yet the US military decided not to go dig up the seat to find what went wrong with it. Thats baaaaad...
- bmitc 4y agoThis was in 1963, so I don't think they had such automated systems like that. Cars didn't even have airbags at the time. And how are they supposed to dig up a seat at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean?
- Sharlin 4y agoRight, the F-8 (introduced in 1955) almost certainly doesn't have a single transistor in it. Probably no vacuum tubes either due to their fragility. It's all hydraulic or electromechanical.
- londons_explore 4y agoApologies - I thought this was in 2009.
- bmitc 4y ago"Jesus Christ!" is my only reaction. This guy survived a sequence of catastrophes, any one of which could have killed him: fire in a plane, failed ejection and being ripped out of the plane, parachute not deploying and hitting water, and being in open ocean for a few hours. I do wonder how in the world he survived hitting the water. Is it just that he hit the jackpot in terms of his entry angle, body position, clothing or boots, and/or likely hitting the water at a crest or something where the surface tension was broken up a bit?
- sharadov 4y agoWhat is insane is that after falling in the water he was still conscious and had the presence of mind to cut the parachute chords. How do you retain all your bearings after multiple things going wrong and just not give up? Testament to his fight to live ( am sure he's unique in that respect).
- cm42 4y agoConstant training, even/especially in bad weather, and constantly preparing for specific tasks like this. "Amateurs practice till they get it right; professionals practice till they can't get it wrong."
- mewse-hn 4y agoThis guy survived his gas tank popping like a balloon inside his supersonic fighter jet, his eject mechanism failing, his backup eject mechanism failing, and his parachute not opening
- eagsalazar2 4y agoThe odds of all those failures seems impossibly high. I wonder if the exploding fuel tank and/or resulting fire is what damaged the eject mechanism?
- the__alchemist 4y ago> At that time no one knew why his aircraft had flamed out. We all supposed it had been some freak accident that sometimes happens with no explanation. One thing we knew for sure, it was not pilot error. This accident had to be some kind of mechanical malfunction, but what? Our squadron had a perfect safety record and was very disturbed because of the loss of an airplane the day before. Today in peacetime if this happened, they might ground the fleet depending on the details and leadership risk climate. If it were pilot error, this would be less concerning, since the cause would be known, and not to cause future problems (other than training-related concerns like if others would make the same mistake) A rogue mechanical failure that causes a crash/bailout is very concerning! Risk tolerance was probably higher back then.
- cat_plus_plus 4y agoNot to diminish anything about the story, but he had a pilot chute and a tangled main chute while falling, lowering terminal velocity and allowing him to land feet first. The rest is up to luck, like landing in turbulent water with lowered surface tension. To be fair, there are several stories of survival even without anything to slow the fall out there.
- cm42 4y ago> “This is very serious,” I thought. Pilots are some of my favorite people.
- trelane 4y agoAnd they say Brits are the kings of understatement. :)
- smugma 4y agoI wasn't sure if it was real or fan fiction. But Googling his name turns up an IMDB account of the story (still doesn't answer the question) but also a link to the article from the Marion Military Institute: https://marionmilitary.edu/grit-profile-cliff-judkins-56-survived-15000-ft-fall/ https://marionmilitary.edu/grit-profile-cliff-judkins-56-sur... Amazing story.
- anderspitman 4y agoReminds me of a web page I stumbled upon many years ago. It was very much visually designed in the 90s style. The whole page was dedicated to tips and tricks for surviving falls from very high distances. I only remember 3 points: * For most of the fall, try to spread out like a flying squirrel to reduce your terminal velocity. * As you get close to the ground, rotate to take the impact primarily on your feet and legs. * After you bounce, try to land on your feet again.
- prego_xo 4y agoafter you bounce is a terrifying concept.
- spbaar 4y agoDidn't it also mention that a lot of survivors hit some type of slope?
- merely-unlikely 4y agoNot sure if it was the same one but I've read you also want to avoid water (since it doesn't compress). Go for dirt/grass if possible.
- ars 4y agoThat doesn't make sense: dirt/grass also don't compress. Small branches might be good, but water is certainly more compresible than dirt.
- BucketsMcG 4y agoIt's really not. Earth's generally full of holes big and small. Water isn't.
- chucksmash 4y agoI agree that it seems unintuitive, but compressibility of water is up to four orders of magnitude lower than a very plastic clay, and even worse than gravel[1]. Generally the speeds at which we impact water are slow enough that this effect is not noticable (i.e. we have time to sufficiently displace, not compress, the water without suffering a catastrophic deceleration). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressibility#Earth_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressibility#Earth_science
- tomcam 4y agoI on the other hand have literally broken my leg twice walking on featureless asphalt
- knodi123 4y agoYeesh, maybe you should try and avoid featureless asphalt in the future.
- tomcam 4y agofuriously takes notes I think the first time was because the asphalt was very very fresh. It was still sticky, and it was a hot sunny day in Oregon. My theory is that my shoe stuck to it. The second time was on my nightly constitutional around my own neighborhood. I'm hoping it's because there was a buckled portion near the curb. But a couple years later I would have foot surgery, and it turns out my bones are spongy. The screws just kind of slipped out because the bone wouldn't hold them. So now I take thousands of milligrams of calcium per day on order of the foot doctor. That in turn has left me with giant kidney stones. :O Long story short I just don't think I have the kind of luck Cliff Judkins had that fateful day.
- pavlov 4y agoWeird 1990s HTML! The document is wrapped in a <table> and each paragraph is inside a <big> tag for some reason. It's a lot easier to read if you add `line-height: 1.8em` to the body tag style.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ksherlock 4y agoAnother interesting incident was Lt Col William Rankin who fell from a distance of 40,000 feet through a thunderstorm. Due to the updrafts, it took 40 minutes while he went up and down like a yo yo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rankin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rankin
- jbverschoor 4y agoDid the parachute not simply open before he landed in the water? He can't remember that part, and he only woke up after the parachute was under water and yanking on him. Either way, refreshing to see a well written piece.
- margalabargala 4y agoThe closed parachute acted as a streamer, slowing him down enough to cause only severe injury on a water landing. Had the parachute opened, an unconscious water landing would not have caused such injuries. That would only happen at speed. Am a licensed skydiver.
- jbverschoor 4y agoNot even when it opened at the last moment? I don’t know how fast he was falling, but even in water it seems almost impossible
- margalabargala 4y agoYou'd be surprised how much having even a couple dozen square feet of canopy can slow you down (his full canopy was probably over 250sqft when fully open). Here's a video of someone whose reserve and main chutes get tangled, and despite them spiraling out of control into the ground, walks away without injury: https://jointheteem.com/videos/friday-freakout-skydiving/friday-freakout-skydiver-survives-nasty-double-parachute-malfunction-dual-rsl-jumpshack-racer/ https://jointheteem.com/videos/friday-freakout-skydiving/fri... You can search videos of "parachute double malfunction" to find other similar examples. The person in the video above certainly had a fair amount of canopy open, but there are others where the person has little more than some crumpled streamers. As far as opening at the last moment, if the person in the OP story had had it open above like 150 feet, it would have slowed him enough to have essentially no injuries. If they fell 15k feet, most of it unconscious, there's no reason it would have opened in the last 150 feet and not the 14850 feet beforehand.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
- jeffrallen 4y agoI work in aviation, and every one of these stories grips me. The complexity of the systems the military uses is enormous, but I especially liked the tremendous effort the Navy put into getting him to a hospital on land within hours.
- martin1975 4y agoGod sometimes spares some who would surely die due to circumstances, like this pilot through a horrific air crash....or Viktor Frankl and other holocaust survivors.... to show His power and glory to the rest of humanity. Or maybe it's just all "luck", as many opined.
- merely-unlikely 4y agoIt amazes the quantity of resources that will sometimes be deployed to rescue a sole man (or a handful) lost at sea. Not to say this is a bad thing; I would certainly appreciate it if I were lost at sea. But it might be questionable to a pure utilitarian. I counted at least one plane, two ships, and a helicopter all being diverted for the rescue. That's a great deal of expense in terms of fuel, I assume hundreds of crew, and lost time in whatever they were supposed to be doing. One might argue that the pilot himself is a valuable resource to the military (cost of training plus his experience, fighter pilots aren't cheap) but there are similar rescues of civilians every once in a while.
- excite1997 4y ago> questionable to a pure utilitarian. So is most of human existence. "Efficient allocation of all resources" isn't a common life goal...
- Pasorrijer 4y agoForbes estimates a basic, entry level fighter pilot costs about $5.6m to $10m+ to train. An experienced pilot, obviously, is even more... But that gives you an idea of the starting value of a pilot!
- piyh 4y agoAnd on the utilitarian front, the first hand knowledge of the failure.
- louison11 4y agoI’d say this is actually when you see the true purpose of a military shine: protect its people. It doesn’t matter how much it costs. This is real love and sacrifice right here. I read that and although I’m not American, I felt very patriotic. What a great attitude and effort all the people involved brought.
- otikik 4y agoI read it differently. I think it’s a tradeoff: they know that if they don’t do that sort of expenditure, troop morale will go down and they will have a less effective group anyway. So they take the lesser hit.
- dctoedt 4y agoSomething similar happened to my dad (USAF fighter pilot) in around 1961 or 62: He was test-flying a T-33 single-engine jet trainer assigned to his unit after it'd had repair work. The engine quit and wouldn't restart. He ejected, but his parachute didn't deploy fully (much the same as in the article) and he got tangled in the shrouds. He said a quick Hail Mary just before crashing head-first in a muddy, fresh-plowed field. The pilot of another plane in the area saw the crash and radioed the tower to send the meat wagon and not the ambulance, but my dad walked away with just a headache — and with his helmet split open like a melon. The impact apparently damaged his inner ear: five years later he started getting vertigo while aloft, and soon afterwards got medically grounded. (That meant he lost the extra flight pay and was reduced to his base pay, with four school-aged kids while stationed in the Washington DC area — to make ends meet, my mother had to go back to work as an RN [registered nurse].) EDIT: What I remember was that when my dad crashed (see above), my mom came to get me from playing with the neighbor kids in their yard. Dad had called her from the flight surgeon's office and told her about the crash (very nonchalantly, she later said), and that he was OK. So six-year-old me blithely went on playing. Of course, my mom had been living with that possibility all their married life ....
- Forgeties79 4y ago>and soon afterwards got medically grounded — which meant he lost flight pay, with four school-aged kids while stationed in the Washington DC area; my mother had to go back to work as an RN (registered nurse) to make ends meet. That’s so, so wrong.
- otikik 4y agoNot only it’s inhumane, it’s also stupid: it incentivizes pilots who have problems like that to hide them, instead of coming forward.
- Diesel555 4y agoI'm not sure I agree with the inhumane (flight pay is an incentive pay where without it pilots still make the same pay as the rest of the military their rank), but I can confirm the stupidity of the policy. Usually anyone medically interacting with a fighter pilot on an issue that could be grounding must spend some time gaining trust for the pilot to be completely open with them. The result of this policy is normally that pilots are completely fine - until they are completely broken.
- fauria 4y agoRelated to this, in 2012 Gary Connery [1] landed a wingsuit over cardboard boxes [2], and in 2016 Luke Aikins [3] jumped from 25000 feet (~7600 metres) without a parachute, landing into a giant net that absorbed the impact [4]. There has been issues of BASE jumpers accidentally landing wingsuits without deploying a parachute too (can't find any reference online at the moment). [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Connery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Connery [2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEP8juRSBRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEP8juRSBRo [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Aikins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luke_Aikins [4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTTOnvvEpn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTTOnvvEpn0
- frontman1988 4y agoI have often wondered if some airbag/spring like device could be created that can save a freefalling person upon impact. A lot of people die in paragliding, skydiving, small aircraft crashes etc. Would be cool if some of those lives could be saved.
- hbarka 4y agoOpposing anecdotes will not be available.
- lkrubner 4y agoThis doesn't seem like a big deal, since it is only 15,000 feet and he had the help of an unopened parachute, which certainly slowed his descent, even though it didn't slow his descent enough. By contrast, Vesna Vulovic fell 33,000 with no parachute to help her, and she also lived. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9496466/stewardess-terror-fell-33000ft-plane-flight-bomb-survived/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9496466/stewardess-terror-fell...
- msla 4y agoBack-of-envelope math on an educational website says terminal velocity for a human in a horizontal position (that is, someone with some control over themselves trying to not go fast) is approximately 120 mph, achieved after falling about 1490 ft. https://owlcation.com/stem/Drag-Force-and-the-Terminal-Velocity-of-a-Human https://owlcation.com/stem/Drag-Force-and-the-Terminal-Veloc...
- lkrubner 4y agoOxygen is much thinner at 33,000 feet. You can still breath at 15,000 feet, most of us have hiked up a mountain almost that tall. In the USA, if you live out West and do a lot of hiking, you've probably gone up at least 12,000 and maybe 14,000, so you understand what 15,000 is. But 33,000 feet? That is much more difficult to survive.
- rainbringer2000 4y agoAfter seeing the video of the fellow in the base jumping incident last week, this feels extra poignant. Glad this guy survived to talk about it.
- scarier 4y agoClassic “screamer” failure—the tag line is that you have the rest of your life to figure it out. “The Man Who Rode The Thunder” is another classic parachute story worth reading.
- FrameworkFred 4y agostories like this make think, if the metaverse is a thing, that guy lived to write that account in exactly one universe.
- jkut 4y agoHow much is that in metres though?
- chris_wot 4y agoThere was a group called the "Caterpillar club" - people who jumped or fell out of airplanes and lived.
- kjs3 4y agoOne of the companies that makes ejector seats sends a tie to anyone who makes full use of their product. https://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/ https://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/ There are some good stories on that page.
- mnemotronic 4y agoGreat story. God had a plan for you Lt. Judkins.
- egberts1 4y ago- 1/25 of squadron without a spleen - 1:1000 parachute failure (general stats) - 1:~970 surviving a free fall. (News excerpts, napkin math). - 3:4 death by ruptured spleens (auto accidents, AMA) - 1:~10500 total failure in a single flight of F-8 Crusader (1955-1978). Nearly all F-8s were declared non-flight ready over time before decommissioning. Last squadron of F-8 were rendered incapacitated by Mt. Pintubo eruption in Philippine air base. - 1:~48 ejection seat failure (1970s, USAF), assuming before F-8E model. Martin-Baker took over at F-8E+. - 1:~15000 total failure of a single inflight refueling by C-130A drogue approach. (1960-1968 est.) Or odds were 8.522882234222e−18. Feels like he was beating at winning the MegaLotto odds.