This came up in an odd lunchtime converstaion, and no one could come up with a good answer. Half a dozen aerospace engineers, and we were all dumbfounded by our own question.
This isn’t the sort of thing you can easily Google, so I’m trying the best source of useless knowledge I know…the SDMB.
For clarification: You’re falling without a 'chute, in just street clothes. Being unconscious at any point in your fall still counts as living. Presumably, blacking out at high altitude would allow you to wake up before you hit the ground anyway (how unpleasant would that be?).
And what, specifically, would be the first consequence of altitude to kill you mid-descent? Oxygen deprivation, freezing, re-entry heating (if you went really high) or something else?
There was that woman who fell 6 or 7 miles. She lived. I think she was a flight attendant and this was sometime in the 70s, maybe. I think some trees broke her fall.
Here is one that really happened. A flight attendant got sucked out of her plane suddenly at 33,000 feet and lived. You can’t go too much higher than that (say above 60,000 feet) or the oxygen deprivation and the hypothermia will kill you before you get a chance to fall to an altitude more suitable to the human body. The impact speed will be the same however from any reasonable height because the human body reaches a terminal velocity of 120 mph or so pretty quickly.
BTW, this question isn’t really that hard to answer. Its been proven that the human body can survive some falls that reach terminal velocity. The other two components are hypothermia and oxygen deprivation. All you have to do is look up the oxygen concentrations (which will be insufficent for most people above 25,000 feet or so) and temperatures at the various altitudes, calculate how long it will take to fall through them, and figure out the maximum exposure time to death for either one of those. I don’t have time to do it right now but it shouldn’t take someone too long.
Did you read the story you linked to Shagnasty? She didn’t get sucked out of the plane, “…saw Vesna’s legs sticking out of the fuselage,” she was still inside a section of it that hit the ground. I think it’s a certainty that the fuselage section did not hit the ground anywher close to perpedicular. More than likely it skidded down a mountain, providing more time to decelerate.
I think there is a difference between how high can a person fall from so that it isn’t completley impossible they will be killed and how high a fall is there a significant chance of survival, even a small one. I learned from mine safety training that a 14 foot fall to a hard surface had a 50% chance of being fatal.
In any event you may look at skydiving accident accounts. I’m sure there have been survival cases where a person impacted level ground from a vertical fall.
Fair enough. She was in some kind of wreckage. However, there are several cases of people freefalling unaided from over 20,000 feet and surviving. The only difference above that height for surviving is temperture and oxygen levels.
I think you’d also have to factor in the landing zone. If they hit snow and trees and big honking piles of foam rubber there’s a better chance of survival than, say, asphalt or concrete.
I think the real difference becomes the surface they fall on and the impact angle. You want to hit a manure pile or a runway?
…so a guy with a space suit and O[sub]2[/sub] pack bails out of SS1 at its apogee and tries to glide to the slopes of Mt. Shasta with a snowboard… Make a hell of a Mountain Dew commercial.
Vesna Vulovic was in the middle section when she hit, and was protected somewhat. Her impact was also reduced by hitting a mountainside, but she still had broken legs, skull fractures, spinal inuries, and short term memory loss (she can’t remember the flight or the month following her fall). She remained a national hero for years, and was personally untouchable while she criticized the Milosevic regime (her career was ruined, though).
Let’s see, 120 mph = 633,600 feet per hour = 10,560 feet per minute.
So…free falling for 2-3 minutes.
2 - 3 minutes.
2 - 3 m.i.n.u.t.e.s.
So. How long do you think before you accept the fact that you’re free falling and then move on to the next phase of the adventure: What 'cha gonna land on, and is there any way of slowing down? Like flapping your arms, blowing(screaming would work) at the ground for all you’re worth…or just accept the fact you’re probably gonna die and make for a head-first impact.
Terminal velocity for a human is roughly 120 miles per hour. To achieve terminal velocity, one must fall around 1,800 feet. (for comparison, the Sears Tower is 1,450 feet). Falling from any distance above 1,800 feet is the same as far as impact velocity is concerned.