I found it!
You might want to browse around this cite to read up on this.
Somewhere in there it says you may have a better chance if you fell from +1,000 than a tall building.
Given that where you’ll find one skyscraper you’ll usually find others, I’m wondering if a safety plan might simply include getting from building A to the (presumably NOT burning) building next to it…Provided you’re not in the tallest building around, you’d just have to get to the roof of a neighboring building. I’m picturing a rope and pulley, a slide, a chute, a big ass rubberband to catapult people over… Okay, maybe not. But I’m sure there’s an engineer that could figure out something better than our current system of nothing.
Of course having the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound would definitely come in handy. Psst. Flickster, it does no good to have an “S” written on your chest if you haven’t got a brainy sidekick to steer you in the right direction.
the skydiving wingsuit increases horizontal travel while you’re falling. but you have to start from higher than 12,000 feet, and you still need a parachute if you plan to jump more than once.
Of course, having a need to get off the top floors of a 1,000 foot building probably also presumes that the floors below you are on fire, as in the case of the World Trade Center.
Even if someone had a 1,000 foot rope, any attempt to descend the rope to the ground would probably have been thwarted by the massive amounts of heat coming from the burning floors. Not only would the heat and smoke have caused problems from any person who tried to make the descent, but i remember that when i did abseiling and rock climbing in school, one of the first rules the teacher told us was to keep the ropes away from fire at all times.
I know that parachuting from a city building is not to be recommended for anyone except the most experienced BASE jumpers. But let’s face it, if you are in a situation where you are thinking about jumpng, it’s probably only because the alternative (staying in the building) is even worse. I’d take my chance with a parachute, rather than jump without one or stay and be burned to death.
I was thinking of a surrounding cushion similar to the balloons used during the touchdown of the Mars landers or the inflatable cushion used by stuntmen. As a practical matter obviously it couldn’t be as big. But it might be made large enough to make the difference between surviving and dying. OTOH, if this really was practical, someone probably would have done it by now.
Offices usually have a tape gun loaded with strapping tape of some kind. And scissors, although I am allowed none but work on the ground floor anyway. I’m sure you could do something cool & flying-squirrel-like with those materials. After falling a certain distance you reach terminal velocity, so in theory the height of the building wouldn’t much matter after, what, 25 storeys? So what you’d need to do is create enough drag to reduce that terminal velocity to something a bit less terminal (sorry) and enjoy the ride down because the landing will still not be pleasant. Any engineers out there? At what speed is a 200lb guy going to hit the ground if he has a 6x6 foot square of carpet strapped to his wrists & ankles? How about a 10 x 1 foot streamer from each?
And how many points for style are you gonna get on the news broadcasts for being dubbed, “the guy who died trying?” Yeah, this is a nutty solution, but it beats getting all hysterical and leaping with nothing on but your dress casuals on.
I’m a skydiver (albeit not a BASE jumper) and as far as parachutes and parasails go, no , those are simply not suitable for escaping out of tall buildings. Somebody who knows what they are doing might get away with it but Joe The Screaming Panicked Mailroom Clerk will be a stain on the pavement. Logistical and training issues kill this one I think.
There are escape devices for evacuating tall buildings - I’ve seen slide tubes that let people get down very quickly (as a matter of fact you can see one in action during the opening jewelry store robbery scene in “A Fish Called Wanda”) and there are rigs that let you run a line to a nearby tall (but shorter) rooftop and then zip a rescue chair back and forth.
Rapelling is technically doable (I met one guy who used to rap jump down from the New River Gorge bridge, 900-something feet up, at Bridge Day) but bringing hundreds of people down in short order would be tricky. Maybe a big loop of rope that goes all the way down with a series of rescue belts on it and some kind of braking mechanism to keep it from going too fast?
I think it’s important to note that most of the people in the WTC towers escaped with their lives and they did so by just walking down the stairs. A properly constructed modern building can be amazingly resilient (look what it took to bring down the WTC) and “Life Safety” is one of the design criteria - big structures are designed so that in a worst-case event the structure will stay up long enough to allow everybody to get out alive.
I am not going to make a comment on the survivability of an untrained jumper in this situation. However IIRC Army Airbourne troops often jump from 400 feet. I was never Airbourne but I have seen live demos. Maybe there is someonewith Airbourne training out there who can confirm this.
Oh, it happened (except I thought it was about 18,000’). He fell on snow covered pines on a steep hill - so the slide down the hill slope helped kill his speed as well as the pines. And was badly injured, was captured by the Germans and was almost shot as a spy because they couldn’t find his parachute - only spies hid their chutes, you see. They found his burned chute remains in the crashed bomber outside the tail-gunners turret.
Not many tall buildings on steep snow covered hills, unfortunately.
DancingFool
Now, Guinness says it was a flight attendant in 1972 (which I remember from a bad book called “22 Strange But True Stories”).
30,000 feet sounds pretty high for a WW-II bomber (although the ceiling of a B-17 was higher than that. 30,000 feet in an unpressurized bucket of bolts would be pretty cold and oxygen-deprived.
[punchline]
“Geez, Superman, you’re mean when you drink.”
[/punchline]
Different length bungee cords on every floor?
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks Loach. I was reading all these comments about “An untrained person couldn’t do it, there’d be too much liability, oh the logistics, etc” and I kept saying to myself “Yes, but is it even POSSIBLE?”
So it seems parachuting is possible. Anyone know if escape tubes are POSSIBLE from this height? (Not if they are easy, not if they are a good idea.) As many others have mentioned, I’d rather increase my odds from 0% up to 1% if I could.
That’s interesting. It was definitely the tail gunner in the 1984 World Records book. I can only think that this story has surfaced since then and knocked the gunner off his perch.
Judging from this quote from your cite:
She was still with the aircraft, or part of it. Did she actually fall free of the aircraft, or did she remain inside it? If she stayed inside it, as suggested by the quote, it is possible the rate of falling wasn’t as great as if she’d been on her lonesome.
A previous poster corrected my 30,000’ to 18,000’ which sounds better as far as the aircraft altitude goes. Of course, it doesn’t really matter how high you are above a certain altitude, once you reach terminal velocity, that’s it.
That’s correct, two different people, two different cases. The bomber crewman during WW2 and IIRC a Czechoslovakian flight attendant in 1972 who fell inside a section of the tail.
I can’t speak to the “falling inside a piece of airplane wreckage” but the human body in a relaxed arch will hit terminal velocity in about 1000 feet so no matter how you look at it these folks were falling FAST, but there’s no real difference between falling 1500 feet or 15,000 feet (more time to appreciate the view I guess).
Loach, you’re correct that airborne troops are dropped at what a skydiver would consider to be suicidally low altitudes (several hundred feet) but they’re using round canopies (which can deploy extremely quickly at low airspeeds) and static lines. Some of my friends are BASE jumpers and I’ve seen plenty of video tape of jumps from even lower - 300 feet, 200 feet, even saw some movies of jumps off a tower about 100 feet tall. There’s some tricks to making a parachute deploy that quickly. I’ve also seen video of a double-BASE rig (it has a reserve canopy, a rarity in BASE jumping) called the Sorceror. It’s built to provide a cutaway from a fully inflated (but uncontrollable) main with full reserve inflation within an incredibly short distance - we’re talking something like 50 feet (impressive to watch. Probably painful to experience).
BoringDad, I can’t see any reason why an escape tube isn’t technically feasible for just about any height. The segmented ones (where you don’t just slide straight down to the bottom) are pretty much ladders when you think about it. If you want to slide all the way down in one shot I think that’d be more of a challenge (keep people from either getting horrible rug burn, causing human traffic jams or just coming down too fast). Or how about a big spiral slide like at the playground?
Could one use long strips (say 20 foot rolls of printer paper) of paper as streamers to slow down? I built a model rocket as kid that used something like that instead of a parachute.
How about inflating one of those Hollywood mattresses on the first floor for everyone? Jump and hope no one lands on you.
With a great deal of skill and luck, it is possible to “surf” a collapsing building to safety.
Are we assuming you could get out of the window? Most skyscrapers I’ve seen don’t have windows that open. What of those poor folks?
In regard to the WWII airman mentioned above, I believe we are talking about Federico Gonzales. His son, Laurence Gonzales, recently published a book, Deep Survival, and the incident is described in detail in the prologue. According to that source, Lt. Gonzales was the pilot of the B-17. The airplane was hit at 27,000 feet, but the order to bail was not given until the plane was already in an uncontrolled descent. Lt. Gonzales is unable to give the precise altitude at which he fell (he did not technically bail because he had passed out from hypoxia), but he estimates that he blacked out while “probably still above 20,000 feet”.
You disappoint me with your lack of imagination. You don’t need a window crank in order to get through a pane of glass.