This is a rather morbid question so I apologise in advance.
Occassionally you hear about people falling while unconcious from a great height (out of an airliner for example), is there a typical position a human body would take up in that situation or not? Ie: would the persons body settle into a neutral position face-forward against the airstream, on their back? Or is there no real standard position?
Thanks in advance.
Since your arms and legs bend more easily forward than backward, and you also bend forward easily at the waist but not backward, you’re probably most likely to end up on your back, bent a bit at the middle, with your arms and legs flailing out in front of you (above you relative to the ground). If you start spinning though, that will tend to push your arms and legs outward and you’ll end up in more of a flat spin, either face up or face down.
There’s a lot of variation though, and you could easily end up tumbling.
There were about half a dozen guys in WWII that basically got shot out of their bombers at 20,000 feet or so (typical bomber altitude at the time) with no chute on and managed to survive. We don’t have any details on exactly how they fell though since they passed out on the way down and were unconscious when they hit. Nicholas Alkemade, Alan Magee, and Ivan Chisov are the ones I remember off the top of my head, but there were a few others as well.
Nick Alkemade is especially notable since he basically walked away with a few scratches and a slightly sprained knee and that was it. The others were all pretty severely injured. Then again, Nick almost ended up being executed because he wasn’t injured and the Germans didn’t believe his story. They thought he was a spy. Fortunately for him, they found the remains of his bomber and found his badly burned chute exactly where he said it would be.
Ivan Chisov was the only one out of that group to leave his bomber with a functioning chute. He planned to drop down below the level of the fighting and then popping his chute so that he wouldn’t just end up getting shot by an angry German fighter pilot, but ended up passing out and hit the ground without ever opening his chute.
Some research material for you here.
From that list, I see that this guy settled into a fairly stable belly-down stance before fellow skydivers intervened.
OTOH, this guy settled into an ass-down stance with a moderate spin rate, before fellow skydivers intervened.
I’ll leave it to you to see what the other videos offer, but based on a sample of N=2, it doesn’t appear that there’s one preferred position.
From those horrifying images of the 9/11 jumpers, I don’t think there is a ‘Typical’ position.
Wow I was aware people had survived falls from airplanes but I didn’t realise there were so many stories. It does remind me of a rather disturbing web-animation I once saw which depicted just how long it would take for someone to hit the ground after falling from a WW2 bomber at typical cruising height, its a long fall, the unconcious crew were the lucky ones.
Thank you Machine Elf.
They weren’t unconcious though.
Why is it believed that a person would always
become unconscious? Is it because it is difficult to breathe or what?
It takes time for the body to become accustomed to major changes in elevation. If you’re inside a plane, where the effective elevation is maybe 8,000 feet, and you go to 20,000 feet by ejecting, you’ll almost certainly black out because the brain is not accustomed to the smaller amount of oxygen.
This. There are mountain climbers who have summited Everest without supplemental oxygen, but it’s a weeks-long process getting acclimated to the high altitude.
In contrast, in the second video I linked to upthread, the skydivers were breathing O2 just before they jumped out of the plane at 22K feet (leaving the bottled O2 behind on the plane), and then one of them promptly passed out.