You have a late night and an early flight. Not long after takeoff, you drift to sleep. Suddenly, you’re wide awake. There’s cold air rushing everywhere, and sound. Intense, horrible sound. Where am I?, you think. Where’s the plane?
You’re 6 miles up. You’re alone. You’re falling.
Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.
[via Instapundit]
Something is wrong with the PS website that link takes you to (I’m using Firefox). It doesn’t show the article. If you go to the PS home page, then click on the article headline, it briefly takes you to the first page, then on to the bad page.
Anyhow, I’ve have a link here to the print version of the article which doesn’t have the problem.
http://popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4344036.html?do=print
Holy shit… ya gotta read the bit about Japanese parachuter Yasuhiro Kubo. What a nutter!
Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.
It isn’t the fall that hurts, it’s that sudden stop at the bottom.
Well if the plane was traveling at the usual 31,000 foot cruising altitude, chances are you will be completely unconscious a few seconds after the plane breaks up, so you will rag doll your way down to your inevitable end.
Only himalayan sherpas can handle such altitudes and only after days of acclimation to the low oxygen.
The question is not how to survive a great fall, but, why aren’t we allowed to bring on a personal parachute?
How To Survive a 35,000-Foot Fall? easy don’t fall, otherwise your pretty much screwed. Of course the trick to flying is throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
#6, daddy,
har
Having seen the complete hash of understanding and describing terminal velocity that was made by the people commenting on the attached article, I intend to pay even less attention to vox populi on scientific matters
Why do you think they call it TERMINAL velocity?