Not meant as an insult, it was what I was thinking. If he (she?) chooses to answer I’ll be pleased to see what’s said.
I tend to wonder why people jump to ‘insulted’ and ‘offended’ so quickly these days too.
I asked the same thing seven years ago. Still not seen it!
Just so you know -
If your flight crew is at all competent, you will NOT hit nose first - they will use every trick they know to keep the plane as close to horizontal and perform an emergency landing on the ocean in the middle of nowhere.
You’ll have at least a few minutes before your fingers go numb and useless and you lose consciousness.
Unless they can’t dump the fuel and the whole thing goes up in a fireball, in which case at least you’ll be dead before the sharks arrive.
I remember one of the first on the scene of United 91 (9/11/01, passenger revolt, crash in PA thin woodland). When asked if there were any survivors, he said something along the lines of:
"To have survivors, you must have intact human bodies - and there are no intact human bodies.
Or, as I put it: Human beings are large bags filled with disgusting stuff. Every once in a while, one ruptures and demonstrates this fact.
If the OP’s scenario (nose first @ 400mph (actually, it would be closer to 600 mph due to gravitational acceleration), then, as stated, the plane would act very much like it had hit concrete; the entire cabin would be disintegrated in less than a second. No pain or even knowledge.
Here’s a Q:
It’s a night flight. all the windows are closed and/or the people beside them are asleep.
Except you.
You lift the shade and see that you are in a straight-down nosedive.
What do you do? Alert the rest of the passengers so they can have a horrifying last 2 minutes?
Close the shade and go back to sleep?
See an attendant nearby and share comforting noises?
There are clips from it available a few places on line. This is a youtube video of a 15 minute New Zealand TV documentary on the 20th Anniversary of the crash. There is cabin footage starting at about 1:00 on the video and going for about 15 seconds or so. I think the flare at the end of the footage was added in post-production. If you go all the way to about 13:30, there a few added bits of footage from the cabin.
This is a site devoted to the accident, the recovery, and the investigation.
Finally, this thread at airliners.net, has a post at reply 38, with a picture taken at the moment of impact. How do we know that? The exterior of the window is misted with either jet fuel or hydraulic fluid. Documentaries of the recovery show actual recognizably human bodies, so I think it’s a reasonable assumption that the impact was not quite as violent as the ValuJet Flt 592, but nevertheless over before most people recognized what was happening.
I’ve seen that picture before. It seems odd to me, if the plane flew straight into a mountain, that there would be fluid over the outside of the window while the window was still intact (and while a person was still in a position to be taking a photo).
It struck me as strange too. Perhaps the caption is incorrect, or perhaps the airplane at that point was resembling the cover of License to Ill? But yeah, if there’d been enough damage to the wing tanks to mist fuel over everything, you’d think the window would have been more damaged and that the camera would have been flung across the cabin by that point.
Yes, but IIRC they also proved that hitting water exposes you to much smaller Gs than hitting concrete.