What you are describing is a PLF or parachute landing fall. Works great at speed below 20 feet per second.
askeptic- several years in the 82nd Airborne Division where I did countless PLFs…
In Cecil’s column on this topic, he gave the example of a Marine pilot in 1963, Cliff Judkins, who survived a 15,000 ft. drop into the Pacific, feet first. At least one news story at the time indicated that a “drogue(pilot) chute” possibly slowed his fall.
It should also be noted that when falling feet first you will impact the ground at a significantly higher velocity than if you are stretched out horizontal maximizing the amount of drag produced.
I asked about falling from a plane some years ago – so these are some fast thoughts too
garygnu - lol
Exactly. Terminal velocity in a flat arch is roughly 180 fps. In a head down no-lift dive (much closer to the standing up posture people are talking about) you’re looking at 300+ fps. A 6’ person going 180fps who manages to stand up the instant before they hit the dirt will have 1/30 of a second to “roll with the fall”.
I have landed a spinning, malfunctioned round reserve in a freshly plowed field (literally, I saw the farmer driving his tractor at the time) and did an extremely good PLF. This was a relatively low-velocity impact and it was both very fast and very uncomfortable - the slap of hitting the ground made me think that some of my internal organs had burst. Net damage was a lot of bruises and sore muscles.
My recommendation for a terminal velocity impact would be to aim for something big and soft and relax. Being rigid when you hit will not help.
Back in my skydiving days I was friends with a guy who survived an ~80mph impact from a stunt gone wrong, he hit the roof of a car in a parking lot and lived to tell about it, but he broke an awful lot of stuff and has plenty of metal in him. What I read about most sport skydiving incidents is that victims of high-velocity impacts generally survive the sudden stop but they are severely injured and die before the paramedics can get to them.
I don’t have a cite, but I seem to recall reading/hearing some statistic about survivors of failed-parachute falls. And that one of the keys was that the person was unconscious at the time of impact - they had fainted or passed out during the fall.
So how best to survive a fall: knock yourself unconscious !
(I’ve thought about this, and have wondered if it would even be possible given the amount of adrenaline that would be pumping through your body at the time).
You’re absolutely going to decelerate much. If you didn’t decelerate, you’d just keep on going straight through the ground. Since it’s the deceleration which kills you, the idea is to have as low a deceleration as possible, which means to do it over as great a distance as possible. Five feet probably isn’t a large enough distance to matter (most such falls are fatal, after all), but it’s a heck of a lot better than the inch or two you’ll get if you land flat.
Even if you were right about that, which you are not, how do you get around the fact that falling feet first you will hit the ground at about 300 fps versus 180 fps if spread out horizontal to the ground? Any illusory advantage gained from feet first landing would be negated by the higher impact velocity.
If you’re heading for water, would it help to drop something to break the surface? Say you’ve got a handy big rock; its terminal velocity is rather higher than yours, so you drop it and follow it in. Or, more likely, there’s some lunk in the same situation who’s panicked and is dropping faster than you. The surface of the water is now disturbed and should offer less resistance to you? Right or wrong? Or right, but not right enough?
Wrong. It’s not surface tension that causes the water to be hard, it’s the inertia of the water itself.
Most deaths from falls come from head trauma or internal organ damage. The heart is suspended by its arteries, and if you stop suddenly the heart will rip itself right out of place (that’s how Diana died in the car crash). The spleen will rupture. The brain will slam against the skull and mash itself. Etc. So your best chance of surving would seem to me to be to stay perfectly flat for as long as you can, to lower your terminal velocity, then attempt to rotate to a feet-first position and lock up your joints so that your leg bones and pelvis absorb the impact by shattering, kind of like your very own personal crumple zones.
Then you might increase your chance of surviving from .000000000000000001 to .0000000001 or something. Falls from a height are one of the most reliable ways to die.
There have been several freak occurances of people surviving falls from airplanes. Usually they are slowed down by streaming parachutes or other debris. One person I read about hit the side of a hill and slid to the bottom. Another hit a large tree, with small branches at the top which slowly got larger.
If it were me, I’d aim for some kind of structure and take my chances. If I could see a house or a barn, I’d try to steer myself for the roof. You might hit it at an angle and glance off it. Or you might crash through it and have the breaking wood absorb some of the energy. Failing that, I’d aim for a hill or marshy area. Anything that has a chance of absorbing impact.
But who am I kidding? I’d probably just yammer IMGOINGTODIEIMGOINGTODIEIMGOINGTODIE over and over again until I hit something in whatever random position I happened to be in while my brain jibbered.
For some extra drag you can unbutton your jacket or shirt and spread the front with your arms, more or less like in this pictures. That should reduce your terminal velocity, how much I don’t know.
What’s that you say? you´re wearing a polo shirt?, aim for a pigstay. 
Not quite on point for this thread - but I had a snowboard fall a few years back. It was basically a straight drop of about 10 meters followed by a slope. There wasn’t much snow, and it was pretty icy, which is why I fell in the first place. I had recently read the column about falling cats (and the back and forth letters appended to it). As I tumbled off the edge, I actually found myself instantly trying to jockey my body into survival positions, while simultaneously trying to squirm past rocky outcrops - the whole straight dope column flashed before my eyes. As it turns out, I was completely uninjured, but this probably had more to do with the roughly gaussian curve of the slope at the bottom, than my application of the flying cat thesis. So my point - normal distribution is a better explanation for survival than any technical knowledge the fallee may have. Still, that falling cat thing was a great column.
Yes, 10 meters is probably a little less than what we’re talking about here.
Before artificial crash test dummies were invented, a fella named Lawrence Patrick used to decelerate himself on rocket sleds…while not a vertical fall, the problem of rapid deceleration is really what you are after here. I believe Mr Patrick lived into his 80s. FWIW. Perhaps looking into some of his research might help solve the arguments about the best way to land, etc. I think he eventually wised up and started using cadavers. He also used animals until PETA was invented, IIRC.
While I’ve seen many suggestions about the best way to position oneself, and which surfaces to aim for, my observation as an emergency physician is that survival in an actual accidental fall depends more on luck than deliberation at the last moment on how to land.
As an aside, I’ve had some interesting discussions about whether or not a truly great height fall is peaceful. I used to argue that it was–endorphins and all that. As a geezer doing a >700 foot bungee at the Verzasca dam, my own observation was that once I stepped off the platform, fear instantly dissipated. However a coworker of mine found a reference to a worker who fell off the Mackinaw Bridge and “screamed all the way down” so I ended up losing my bet. He did not have the reassurance of a bungee cord, of course.
I imagine she was shitting herself all the way dooooowwwwnnnn.
Still she was in the loo
askeptic, I just wanted to make sure you saw this. flight is absolutely right on this one. A skydiver using a parachute also reaches terminal velocity, a very low one. And good thing too…because not hitting terminal velocity means you never stop accelerating. :eek:
Does acceleration have anything to do with it? Is hitting the ground at x kmph while accelerating worse than hitting it at x kmph while at terminal?
I remember a story about a female skydiver whose chute failed, and she plummeted feet first into someone’s very soggy front lawn. She survived as her leg structure basically shattered and “telescoped” together.
Seconded.
Ah well, colour ignorance fought. I was hoping for some sort of sliding off the roof type result.
Yeah I know. I was answering based on the terminal velocity of a human in free fall which is what the OP asked about. I was pointing out that the stewardess never reached that velocity because she was inside the body of an aircraft in a flat spin.
Furthermore a skydiver under a deployed chute does not reach terminal velocty. Terminal velocity refers to an object in free fall.