There have been a few people who survived some long, long falls from airplanes without a parachute. I think the longest fall belongs to a Russian woman who fell from well over 25,000 ft and lived.
There was one person who fell from an airplane and hit the side of a snow-covered slope and slid to the bottom alive but severely injured.
Another person fell from 20,000 ft or so, hit the top of a tree, and broke through succesively larger branches, each one slowing him down, until he eventually stopped. Amazingly, this person didn’t even break a bone.
A friend of mine jumped from a plane and had his parachute ‘streamer’ on him. He panicked and pulled the reserve without cutting away the main, and it streamered up along with it. He landed in a soft alfalfa field and survived, although he was in the hospital for a few months. The streamered chutes probably slowed him down to maybe 80 mph instead of 120-180.
I keep forgetting to add something regarding the original question:
If the plane ‘falls apart’, the forces involved will probably kill you instantly. There would be a huge change in drag profile, with corresponding huge accelerations on your body.
A pilot was killed just a couple of months ago at the Reno Air Races when his race plane came apart in the air. Subsequent analysis indicates that he was almost certainly killed instantly by the forces involved when the plane came apart.
If you’ve ever seen a mid-air structural failure you’d know what I mean. I’ve seen airplanes lose their tail in flight, and the forces just about turn the thing into confetti. In the case of the race plane, it was using a modified Learjet wing which could probably handle at least 12 G’s in the configuration it was being used for, and it folded like cardboard when the tail came off.
Their flight attendants, when giving the pre-flight briefing, keep a straight face while explaining that, in the event of a a depressurization emergency, the first thing you should do is to stop screaming…