In March 1944, it was dangerous for British bombers to carry out missions over Germany, and in the months leading up to that, German defenses had shot down more than 1,000 British bombers. On a moonlit night, Sergeant Nick Alkimad was flying steadily along the course in a plane. After the plane dropped the bomb, it turned around and returned.
Suddenly, the bomber was hit by a shell from a German fighter jet. One shell blew off the transparent dome that covered the tail turret, leaving Archimad staring blankly into space. By the time he heard the pilot's command to jump and reached for the parachute, it was already burning in flames. The burning heat made him feel severe pain, and he knew he would die. He thought that instead of being burned alive, he would simply jump down and fall to his death. So he jumped out of the plane.
For the next minute and a half, he felt not fear, but great tranquility. "When I fell from a height of more than 5,500 meters in Germany, I felt an incredible calm. Cold air brushed my blistering face, and stars seemed to fly between my legs. I thought to myself that if this was death, there was nothing terrible about death, and I lost consciousness. ”
He slowly woke up. "I felt very cold, bitingly cold. I struggled to sit up. Then, I was shocked: I'm still alive! ”
Archimad fell straight for more than 5 kilometers before landing on the ground, but the situation was so good that it was unbelievable. He suffered only some burns, a slight concussion, and severe cuts to his scalp, a sprain to his knees, and a cut to his thighs. As he lay in the snow, he understood why he had been lucky enough to save his life. He looked up at the sky and saw the moonlight sprinkling through the gaps in the fir trees. The branches stopped him as he fell, and then let him fall into the dense bushes under the forest, which blocked him again, and finally he fell into the snowdrift.
For years, I've been collecting similar stories— the stories of people who survived nine deaths in the air.
On January 26, 1972, a DC-9 passenger plane of the Yugoslav Civil Aviation Corporation exploded over the Czech Republic, and a flight attendant named Visna Volovik on board dropped 10,000 meters in the tail of the plane. Rescuers found parts of her body embedded in the wreckage of the plane. She fractured her spine, leg and arm bones and was in a coma for three days, suffering from amnesia for several weeks afterwards. But then she finally fully recovered and returned to work in the sales department of the civil aviation company.
If we think about the speed at which her body landed, we know that it was unusual for her to survive. About 12 seconds after a free-falling skydiver leaves the plane, the air resistance is equal to gravity, and from then on, the skydiver will remain at the same speed and land at a constant speed. If the air pressure is normal and the skydiver's body is stretched flat, the speed of descent is about 190 kilometers per hour, but if it is swooped down, the speed will reach 300 kilometers per hour.
Descending at 190 kilometers per hour in the air can feel comfortable, at least for a lifeless skydiver who is confident that he can open his parachute. Early free-landing forers Harry Armstrong, who estimated he himself had descended 370 meters at 190 kilometers per hour, described the experience afterwards, saying: "I don't have the feeling of empty belly that I usually feel when an elevator and an airplane lands." Although I don't wear eye protection to protect against high winds, my eyes don't feel irritated either. Normal and smooth breathing. Limiting my ultimate fall speed to air resistance of 190 kilometers per hour, gently and evenly pressing on me, it felt like it was slowly landing on a large pile of soft and incredibly soft fluff. ”
At high altitudes, because the air is thin, the descent will be much faster. U.S. Air Force Joseph Kittinger once jumped from a balloon at an altitude of 31,300 meters in the air. A record speed of 988 km/h was set. He was experimenting with a multi-stage parachute that could be used to skydive from a very high altitude all the way down to 3,000 meters — where the atmosphere was oxygenated enough to sustain life — before opening the main parachute. As the air density grew, Kittinger's speed of descent was greatly reduced, and when he descended to an altitude of 5300 meters, he opened his parachute, and he landed freely for 26 kilometers, which lasted 4 minutes and 37 seconds.
But neither Nick Archimard nor Vesna Volovick had parachutes, so how could they land safely? Much of this depends on luck, such as falling into something as soft as a snowdrift. But there is no doubt that another important factor is the softness and resilience of the human body. A particularly robust cabin can withstand impact forces up to 45 gravitational accelerations. But scientists at Cornell University School of Medicine estimate that a man who fell off a large chimney without falling to his death had a body that hit the ground with 162 accelerations of gravity.
One man once fell straight down from a 45-meter-high trellis, fell on loose rubble, and hit a 20-centimeter-deep crater on a 30-degree slope. He then bounced or tumbled over a concrete paravert wall, then fell another 3 meters to a lower ground, where he was rescued by some frightened witnesses. But he only had a ruptured ankle and jawbone and chest pain for a day or so, and soon recovered.
Scientists at Cornell University studied the accident in hopes of measuring the human body's ability to tolerate impact forces. It turns out that the human body can withstand the force that can destroy any type of aircraft at present. That is to say, if the victims of the collision incident were not injured by debris, if they could escape the fire, they could indeed escape death.
In June 1985, a teenage boy stumbled while climbing Mount San Gabriel in California, and fell nearly 50 meters into a pool of water more than one meter deep. But he only cut his knees and had some bruises, and he was discharged after applying the medicine.
Some of the more amazing near-deaths happened to those who did not fall to the ground. On the night of February 11, 1986, when aircraft pilot Cadet Dean Pratz and instructor Ed Walshborn were preparing to land at Ontario International Airport in California, they flew into a 220,000-volt network of high-voltage power lines, and their Cessna small planes rolled over, belly to the sky, and glide for more than 100 meters without wires before stopping, hanging there by propellers and front landers at a distance of 26 meters. High-voltage wires automatically cut off the current when they collide. The pilot thought they had landed and wanted to get off the plane. Fortunately, the instructor shouted at him: "We are still on the wire, come back!" ”
Rescuers mounted the plane with a crane, while firefighters used water-powered ladders to rescue the two men. As a result, they finally reached the ground safely.
The rarest of small plane accidents is when someone falls from one plane to another. In a cinematic aerobatic shot, it is Frank Clark who pilots the plane for a stunt flight. A man named El Wilson was supposed to bend his knees and hang himself upside down on the plane's wing sled, waiting for Clark to fly up from behind to pick him up. But before Clark could fly, Wilson had already lost his hand. Clark immediately swooped down at full speed and flew below Wilson. After Falling 15 meters, Wilson slammed his head into Clark's wing at an altitude of 1500 meters above the ground and stuck there. Clark flew back to the ground cautiously, and Wilson kept caught in his wing.
There's also the story of Wallace Smith in Louisville, Kentucky. Once, in 1942, when he was flying low in a plane, he saw a familiar girl. He waved to the girl, and the girl saluted him, much to his delight. It was in this trance that his plane hit a tree and a power line, then crashed into another tree, stopping at the top of that tree. Smith climbed down and ran to the girl to tell her he wasn't injured. When he walked to her side, he once again fell from the cloud of nine clouds and returned to reality. It turned out that the girl was something he didn't know.