I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)
uss-la-ca135.org
uss-la-ca135.org
EDIT: What I remember was that when my dad crashed (see above), my mom came to get me from playing with the neighbor kids in their yard. Dad had called her from the flight surgeon's office and told her about the crash (very nonchalantly, she later said), and that he was OK. So six-year-old me blithely went on playing. Of course, my mom had been living with that possibility all their married life ....
That’s so, so wrong.
So while today it's not a lot, back then it'd be at least a 30% pay cut which would be hard for any family.
I have a pilot acquaintance that would refuse to go to the doctor when he was younger.
I also tried to become a pilot, but because of a documented history of taking anti-depressants, the FAA grounded me for life, despite being years removed from needing them. [1] I wish that history was not documented.
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2022/09/grounded-for-life-losing-the...
>safety comes first. Always.
The safest way to keep the airspace above the US would be to ban all general and commercial aviation.
Safety does not come first. Safety never comes first, because the safest course of action is to never do anything. It is always a balancing of risk.
It is very unfortunate that something like this is keeping you from your dream. I'm sorry.
Yes, another of their missions is to facilitate aviation.
What I meant is that in my case, the default decision couldn't be to give me a medical. So I should have limited the "safety comes first" to my case.
A more charitable interpretation is to say that pilots without issues are defined as safe, which they are even if they are not in practice. They're safe enough.
This is usually done on a case-by-case basis; I just happened to come down on the unlucky end of it.
" He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."
> “This is very serious,” I thought.
It's just after
> "The main, 24-foot parachute was just flapping in the breeze and was tangled in its own shroud lines. It hadn’t opened! I could see the white folds neatly arranged, fluttering feebly in the air.
So... after the flame-out, after the fire, after the lack of radios, after the failed ejection, after the canopy manual ejection, after jumping out of the plane, after not hitting the tail, then after pulling his parachute and it doesn't open does he finally think - man this is serious.
That's typical of military pilots — their ethos is to present a calm, unruffled mien to the world. Phrases such as, "I was a bit concerned" would translate as "I was this close to sh*tting my pants from terror" in normal human-speak.
(Source: Dad and sister were military pilots, plus my own service aboard an aircraft carrier.)
There's a great and probably-apocryphal story in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff where a rookie Navy fighter pilot is part of a dog fight with North Korean (probably Russian-piloted) MIGs; the rookie is shouting excitedly into the radio, "He's on my six! He's on my six!" Another American Navy pilot responds, "Shut up and die like an aviator" — as in, naval aviator.
The other pilot is not wrong. If I can't already see that there's a MiG on your tail, what on earth am I gonna do about it? Least of all because in that era would I even know which direction you are from me at that moment, if I wasn't your wingman? Meanwhile you're screaming over everybody else's wingman.
If you're a theist, you might be forgiven for thinking that someone was trying really hard to get your attention, after a day like that.
(Just kidding. Not sure about that pilot, but the book's author, Ron Knott, has written a number of Christian books. Wouldn't surprise me if that's related to why the book included that story.)
Yeah after that I might ask for a transfer and also vow to never again to sleep with a maintenance chief’s wife.
A lot of things have happened in my life where all I think at the moment is "that's funny..." or "hmmm"
:)
aesop #2 - man falls off horse and breaks leg. pretty damsel unwilling to wed man because he is lame. everyone says, you are so unlucky. lost your leg. lost your lady. now what ? king announces war and all the able men of the village are drafted. our man stays home because he is lame. the able soldiers are killed off by the enemy. pretty damsel marries sole surviving lame man.
many more where that came from :)
"The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbours as one living a pure life.
A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was with child.
This made her parents angry. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last named Hakuin.
In great anger the parent went to the master. “Is that so?” was all he would say.
After the child was born it was brought to Hakuin. By this time he had lost his reputation, which did not trouble him, but he took very good care of the child. He obtained milk from his neighbors and everything else he needed.
A year later the girl-mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth – the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fish market.
The mother and father of the girl at once went to Hakuin to ask forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back.
Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said was: “Is that so?”"
Man's horse runs away: aww Horse returns, brings new wild horse: yay new horse Son riding wild horse breaks leg: aww War comes and takes able-bodied men: yay get to live
The pilot is light would leave the cockpit flat or even bent over, which is a very non-aerodynamic shape. His ballistic coefficient would be low. He would decelerate quickly, and the tail would catch up with him and slam him from behind.
What this would look like I think. Slow down to increase angle of attack in level flight. The nose is now high (likely already occurred after flameout and ejection attempts without thinking about it - check). Go full deflection rudder trim to skid the aircraft. Now trim the ailerons and elevators to fly level based on drag and adverse yaw. Get out.
A car equivalent would be applying the handbrake and "trimming" it so it sticks with your hands off, then steering into a skid so you're drifting, then trimming the steering wheel; now your car is moving in an otherwise dynamically unstable configuration (drifting), but it maintains the configuration hands-free because you have locked-in the settings. A driver could then step out of a moving vehicle without the risk of being run over by their own car
If he'd had a spleen there would be no story to tell. People have fallen that distance and not lived (possibly because they had spleens).
We have made great strides since then, of course, but it does feel like 90% of the fundamental aviation technology we have today was created just in the first few decades.
You could probably come up with something similar to Moore's law for for those stats over those first 50 years. Makes me wonder if/when computing will reach a similar plateau. It's felt like we're close for a while, but at least if you allow for a somewhat flexible definition, it just keeps trucking along.
However, there have been huge improvements in other areas, like efficiency and safety. Take a look at this fatal accident charts, and remember that aviation usage has been growing in the meantime, so rates per passenger and per passenger mile have been improving even more than this shows.
https://aviation-safety.net/graphics/infographics/Fatal-Acci...
We can chart that directly, and I agree it's impressive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...
And yeah, that's a huge improvement in safety. So while the general shape of airplanes, and range and speed might seem similar, the airplanes themselves and the whole ecosystem around them (pilots, maintenance, airline and airport ops, air traffic control, and so on) are far safer.
The US has incredible aircraft but no incentive to 'share'.
At the kind of range that Concorde and the Tu-144 operated at, you can either spend three hours in a plush but narrow seat, or you can leave at night in a lie-flat business seat and wake up refreshed after a 6-8 hour sleep.
The Boeing 787 Dreamliner doesn't look very different from the 737 and its predecessors. But under the hood are some revolutionary technologies: fly-by-wire all-electronic controls, and construction primarily from carbon fiber composite materials rather than the traditional steel, aluminum, and titanium. It's actually pretty revolutionary, but it still looks and feels like a fairly normal plane, because it's the physics of air flow that dictates basic things like shape.
There have always been novel concept planes but they usually fall apart for practical reasons
* SSTs like Concorde use a lot more fuel and have to be narrow, to the point of sacrificing comfort
* blended wings are not desirable for passenger comfort; people like windows and hate middle seats
* airplanes have to fit within the constraints at operating at airports that currently exist. Cities are not going to build new airfields or modify existing ones for billions of dollars for what might be a technological fad instead of a long term improvement, so you pretty much need to fit existing gates, existing runway widths and weight limits, etc. The A380 needed such modifications and therefore could not be flown everywhere.
That's because the seminal work rapidly evolved into something that's good-enough, and in some cases, close to optimal.
If you look around, wherever you're sitting, you'll find plenty of other human-engineered objects from a similar design-trajectory.
My coffee mug looks a whole lot like cups from Mesopotamia and earlier.
On a whim I have investigated old computer architectures and was surprised to find myself completely at home despite when they call the 'instructions' 'orders'. :)
But to be fair, the Wright brothers first flight might be the start of an era, but the history of aviation has at least 1 century of intense experimentation and developing leading up to that.
https://theaviationgeekclub.com/sr-71-pilot-explains-how-he-...
Recent HN discussion (including links to prior discussions):
I counted at least one plane, two ships, and a helicopter all being diverted for the rescue. That's a great deal of expense in terms of fuel, I assume hundreds of crew, and lost time in whatever they were supposed to be doing.
One might argue that the pilot himself is a valuable resource to the military (cost of training plus his experience, fighter pilots aren't cheap) but there are similar rescues of civilians every once in a while.
While I am no expert on these things, a few of the videos / articles / images I've seen of Russians fighters in Ukraine lead me to believe they don't feel this similar level of support from their armed forces, which could be contributing adversely to the outcome (from their perspective).
* For those who don't know: Recipients of medals for valor in combat (I'm not a member of that august group) don't like it when people say they "won" the medals, because all too often some of their friends died in the engagement; the preferred usage is that someone "received" or "was awarded" the medal in question.
> Hambleton had Top Secret access to Strategic Air Command operations and was an expert in surface-to-air missile countermeasures. The North Vietnamese Army may have possessed information about his presence in Vietnam and his capture would have meant a huge intelligence bonanza for the Soviet Union.
Is there another name for it? Besides the obvious name of whatever the "enemy" called it at the time?
I guess I was thinking that HN is a very multinational forum, and I don't know what people in other countries would call the Vietnam War.
(I'm reminded of how genteel Southern ladies supposedly used to refer to the Civil War as The Late Unpleasantness.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology_of_the_Vietnam_War
I'd mostly agree with the russian opinion (from what I've seen), but i certaily haven't seen it regarding the Ukranians. r/combatfootage r/ukkranianwarvideoreport etc.. Quite the opposite. I'd guess being trained by the us and uk has had an effect. As an aside, whenever ukraine forces pass, they always wave to each other.
> I assume hundreds of crew, and lost time in whatever they were supposed to be doing.
They aren’t producing widgets. They are mostly idle or training for a real event anyway. This was a good training exercise at a minimum.
Similar for sailors. They get paid the same whether they're rescuing someone or drawing figure-8s in the middle of the ocean.
More realistically, it's a human decision making process where everyone quickly aligns to do whatever it takes to rescue the downed pilot. I've seen first hand how US military members think in real life situations like this. Everyone acts without a hint of self-interest around the clock until they have exhausted all options.
In fairness, it helps that it's the US military and money is typically of no concern in operational settings. :-)
There's likely a similar argument to made for the military, but involving morale and willingness to take personal risks in emergencies or times of war. Esprit de Corps and all that.
These both in addition to all other arguments in favor of such rescues.
Yup. But it's not a conscious calculation; more like a primal urge (or so I'm told, by people like my dad, who had first-hand experience fighting in the Korean War).
Every sailor on those ships watched them send everything they had to rescue the pilot. Every one of them repeats this story. And every kid/new recruit hears it. My guess is that it instills a sense of safety where there isn't any.
I certainly feel safer traveling abroad knowing the lengths America generally goes to rescue its own.
That's definitely part of the rational behind the more general duty to provide assistance at sea:
"A master or individual in charge of a vessel shall render assistance to any individual found at sea in danger of being lost, so far as the master or individual in charge can do so without serious danger to the master’s or individual’s vessel or individuals on board."
In the same way, we spend resources to save one drowning man, not so much to save that one man, but to let all seafaring men to know that if need be, we will do our best to save them.
Especially when you consider the tertiary effects of greater widespread daily peace of mind and social morale, two things that tend to spill over positively into all areas of life and to non-obvious beneficiaries.
So is most of human existence. "Efficient allocation of all resources" isn't a common life goal...
An experienced pilot, obviously, is even more... But that gives you an idea of the starting value of a pilot!
In other words, optimizing some aspects of a very complex and well functioning system, such as society, locally is likely to mess things up globally.
> Or perhaps his error is to consider dollars to be the ultimate commodity.
I was thinking (from a utilitarian perspective) about where those dollars could have been deployed to have a larger human benefit. Ie if the operation cost $500k (I really don't have good numbers on this but two military ships + the aircraft are not cheap) how else could you use that $500k to help people in need.
A) Legend has it that the last bow-tie-wearing nerd to question this policy slipped and fell overboard, or was maybe left for dead in the parking lot of some fisherman's dive bar in a quaint New England town. Nobody really knows for sure, because HIPAA, I think.
B) nobody in any decision-making-slash-accountability chain dares approach it that way, not only because they don't want to be knifed to death behind an AutoZone, but precedent goes back to, I dunno exactly, but I'll be bold and say "the dawn of seafaring", or maybe "whenever international maritime law was written down". (It ends up finding its way into "render assistance" clauses in some motor vehicle codes, by way of Rich People Horseless Carriage Sunday Driving Clubs and their Gentlemanly Codes of Honour or whatever - notably, predating Good Samaritan, IIRC.)
C) Most "diverted" resources probably aren't really doing anything of importance anyway, and people dying takes precedence over, say, taking pictures of the water or how sparkly the ozone layer is. Also, there's a good chance it's <training>.
There's usually a high degree of parallelism during the Search phase, as only the irrelevant half of the math works out on the fuel/time efficiency of, say, 1 aircraft vs 100 to fly a grid when the guy is (e.g.) clinging to a liferaft rope with broken arms, legs, back, and pelvis in 5' seas. The other 98 can go home (or the circles they were flying before) when Search is solved for and Rescue begins.
D) it's free training, almost certainly more interesting-slash-valuable than whatever was planned, and much higher fidelity than any simulation - PLUS! all of the inadequate planning, mixed messaging, nose-picking, dick-measuring, wrong radio channel-ing, confusion, ignorance, broken equipment, and general chaos of dealing with actual people in real life! ("practice how you perform/you perform how you practice")
As the OP demonstrates, there's often only a moment or two between your shitbox (built by the lowest bidder) catching on fire, and the need to flawlessly execute and context-switch through multiple checklists, with only your non-dominant hand, flight gloves, and your backup pocket knife, else everything explodes and everybody dies, The End.
The Navy sends ships out to sea during hurricanes, both because it's safer than smashing against docks, and “A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor". Also, there are some interesting anecdotes about building lazy or incorrect muscle memory, or people panicking and reverting to classroom-style behavior (like cleaning up and organizing tools) when they feel they've reached The End of their Scenario, as it were. Contrary to popular myth, most people get dumber and forget the most basic of things under pressure, rather than Rising To The Occasion and, classically, lifting a car off of a baby.
So, I suppose all of this is to say that one should probably also amortize the (extraordinary) cost of things like this over the value of things like "a competent Navy", "proficient aeromedical crews", "Marines that can count AND do things with their hands", "being able to insert a trauma surgeon (or explosives) basically anywhere in the world inside of a few hours", and so on.
As an old partner of mine would sing while chugging preworkout, checking equipment, and getting psyched for the day:
You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow // This opportunity comes once in a lifetime // You better
(Or, if you prefer the Latin: Haec Facimus, Ut Alii Vivant, Ut Ceteri Vivant, Etc.)
My contribution to impressive feats of survival bailing out of an airplane is this story of a WWII ball turret gunner who survived a fall from his bomber without a parachute:
https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/03/04/during-ww2-an-amer...
I think there are other such WWII stories, I seem to recall someone who fell into an evergreen forest in winter and credited the snow-laden trees for his survival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade
The story I linked to above is of Alan Magee, a B-17 ball turret gunner who fell through the glass roof of the Saint Nazare train station.
They’re not the same story, but boy are they similar!
That was the scene I had in mind when I mentioned sitting in a barbershop arguing about the greatest boxer who ever lived, and while I didn't want to repeat that speech word-for-word, I was most definitely thinking of the Joe Frazier Rocky Marciano line you picked out.
Finally, for all three people in the world who care, I picked George Chuvalo as my reply specifically because he is famous for fighting Ali twice and staying on his feet both times.
I was thinking "what movie did I miss where they discussed Dicky Eklund and George Chuvalo?" I was wondering if it was from that old Showtime documentary about Dicky's darker times.
https://deadspin.com/the-real-dicky-eklund-in-hbos-high-on-c...
The joke Eddie tells at the end in character as Saul cracks me up to this very day. When we succeed at tricking someone into recognizing an unpleasant truth, my entire family will waggle a finger and intone “Aha!” in tribute.
Example: “Hey, what colour is the rubber base of the dog dish?”
“Hang on… Ewww, it’s dirty, needs to be washed.”
“Aha!”
> Paramedics brought a barely conscious Joan to Carolinas Medical Center for emergency treatment. Doctors determined that repeated fire ant stings luckily shocked her heartbeat and stimulated her nerves. The insect assault kept her heart beating and her organs functioning long enough to keep her alive during transport, where she fell into a comatose state.
https://web.archive.org/web/20180313145230/skydiving.com/new...
He was the tail gunner on a WW2 Avro Lancaster that was on fire and going to crash. So he simply opened the door and jumped.
> His fall was broken by pine trees and a soft snow cover on the ground. He was able to move his arms and legs and suffered only a sprained leg.
> Alkemade was subsequently captured and interviewed by the Gestapo, who were initially suspicious of his claim to have fallen without a parachute. This was until the wreckage of the aircraft was examined and his parachute was found as Alkemade had described it. The Germans gave Alkemade a certificate testifying to the fact. He was a celebrated prisoner of war, before being repatriated in May 1945.
He fell 5 km and basically walked it off. Even the Germans were duly impressed.
A ‘standard’ human falls between 110-130 mph in a ‘flat’ belly to earth position (which actually requires non-trivial training to achieve reliably).
Someone tumbling in an uncontrolled fashion will have wildly varying and often higher speeds.
Someone ‘tracking’ can have highly reduced descent rates, even as low as 90mph (no wing suit required).
Someone falling with a drogue chute or partially deployed chute can fall slower, or faster, depending on what body position it ends up putting them in and how much drag it actually produces. If it wraps around their leg or arm for instance, it can put them in a feet down or head down position, which will have them falling a lot faster. Head or feet down can easily be 150+ mph without special gear.
Having done it, it’s quite noticeably faster, and you have to watch the altitude a lot more as your floor comes up much faster than your intuition expects.
Source: licensed skydiver (C for anyone who cares), with a decent number of relative formation work and free flying in my logbook.
But really, it's silly to compare these. Neither relied on any personal qualities to achieve the outcome, it is basically just blind luck in both cases. Without Cliff's lack of spleen or Vesnas weirdly low blood pressure, both probably would have died. Or if they just landed oriented slightly differently.
I would use impressive for cases where the main subject has considerable influence in the outcome, as, for example, Ernest Shackleton had, or as people lost at sea for months with very limited resources had.
(In this case, the part where he survives while in the ocean may be impressive, but I have no idea how hard that was)
Water is basically concrete at terminal velocity. I'm not an expert, but I wouldn't be surprised if he survived because he fell into the water at the location of his plane, which was emitting bubbles that break the surface tension and make water safer to fall into
The actual reason water is so hard is simply that the water need to move out of your way when you fall into it, and if you are moving faster than it can do that then you simply hit the water as if it were a solid.
Both bubbles and waves make it easier for the water to move out of your way.
Edit: at slowing your fall I mean.
In sports skydiving, it’s generally considered fatal either way to not have a fully functioning parachute above your head long before you come back in contact with the ground.
A partially deployed parachute is also considered to be one of the most potentially lethal types of malfunctions, as it has a high risk of entangling the reserve parachute. Bailout parachutes often don’t have a backup.
The whole page was dedicated to tips and tricks for surviving falls from very high distances. I only remember 3 points:
* For most of the fall, try to spread out like a flying squirrel to reduce your terminal velocity.
* As you get close to the ground, rotate to take the impact primarily on your feet and legs.
* After you bounce, try to land on your feet again.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressibility#Earth_science
But also, it makes sense when you think about it a bit, too. Dirt is a mostly heterogeneous mixture of _stuff_ that tends to clump, which leaves great pockets of air in between that can get compressed out. Water, on the other hand, is a homogeneous liquid with _no_ air in between. There's practically nothing to compress!
A great read.
That makes it sound a lot easier than it actually is.
I do wonder how in the world he survived hitting the water. Is it just that he hit the jackpot in terms of his entry angle, body position, clothing or boots, and/or likely hitting the water at a crest or something where the surface tension was broken up a bit?
"Amateurs practice till they get it right; professionals practice till they can't get it wrong."
I've only seen it a handful of times in the wild - notably, a flight school wall - and every so often to close out blog entries on High-Speed, Low-Drag™ topics in (i.e.) aviation, search and rescue, emergency medicine, etc.
There's a few clever "practice" ones too that I can't seem to recall, other than: "Oops, guess that's why they call it practicing medicine!"
Great story
I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15480334 - Oct 2017 (246 comments)
Today in peacetime if this happened, they might ground the fleet depending on the details and leadership risk climate. If it were pilot error, this would be less concerning, since the cause would be known, and not to cause future problems (other than training-related concerns like if others would make the same mistake) A rogue mechanical failure that causes a crash/bailout is very concerning!
Risk tolerance was probably higher back then.
I think the first time was because the asphalt was very very fresh. It was still sticky, and it was a hot sunny day in Oregon. My theory is that my shoe stuck to it.
The second time was on my nightly constitutional around my own neighborhood. I'm hoping it's because there was a buckled portion near the curb. But a couple years later I would have foot surgery, and it turns out my bones are spongy. The screws just kind of slipped out because the bone wouldn't hold them. So now I take thousands of milligrams of calcium per day on order of the foot doctor. That in turn has left me with giant kidney stones. :O
Long story short I just don't think I have the kind of luck Cliff Judkins had that fateful day.
If so, upon a refuelling the day before which caused a flame-out and loss of a plane, there is no way they should have been reusing that same tanker until the root cause was understood.
There could have been other causes, like a bad batch of fuel (could easily cause a flameout), debris in the fuel, water in the fuel, a subtle leak in the connector, something that causes foaming of the fuel, etc.
Exception: A major war where risking loss of a few more planes and people is worth it to avoid missing a military maneuver that cannot be delayed.
There has been issues of BASE jumpers accidentally landing wingsuits without deploying a parachute too (can't find any reference online at the moment).
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Connery
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEP8juRSBRo
Pilots are some of my favorite people.
- 1:1000 parachute failure (general stats)
- 1:~970 surviving a free fall. (News excerpts, napkin math).
- 3:4 death by ruptured spleens (auto accidents, AMA)
- 1:~10500 total failure in a single flight of F-8 Crusader (1955-1978). Nearly all F-8s were declared non-flight ready over time before decommissioning. Last squadron of F-8 were rendered incapacitated by Mt. Pintubo eruption in Philippine air base.
- 1:~48 ejection seat failure (1970s, USAF), assuming before F-8E model. Martin-Baker took over at F-8E+.
- 1:~15000 total failure of a single inflight refueling by C-130A drogue approach. (1960-1968 est.)
Or odds were 8.522882234222e−18.
Feels like he was beating at winning the MegaLotto odds.
https://www.phys.ufl.edu/courses/phy3221/spring10/HaldaneRig...
Maybe because "falling" is such a simple thing and experienced by almost all land animals... and just changing a few properties can mean the difference of life or death.
After learning about it as a kid, I thought "if I ever get in a plane crash, I just need to grab stuff to fall less fast and maybe I'll survive." (which is not realistic at all but you know, lol)
https://marionmilitary.edu/grit-profile-cliff-judkins-56-sur...
Amazing story.
Either way, refreshing to see a well written piece.
Had the parachute opened, an unconscious water landing would not have caused such injuries. That would only happen at speed.
Am a licensed skydiver.
I don’t know how fast he was falling, but even in water it seems almost impossible
Here's a video of someone whose reserve and main chutes get tangled, and despite them spiraling out of control into the ground, walks away without injury:
https://jointheteem.com/videos/friday-freakout-skydiving/fri...
You can search videos of "parachute double malfunction" to find other similar examples.
The person in the video above certainly had a fair amount of canopy open, but there are others where the person has little more than some crumpled streamers.
As far as opening at the last moment, if the person in the OP story had had it open above like 150 feet, it would have slowed him enough to have essentially no injuries. If they fell 15k feet, most of it unconscious, there's no reason it would have opened in the last 150 feet and not the 14850 feet beforehand.
I wonder if OP was very unlucky, or if perhaps many of the rarely used bits of safety equipment perhaps aren't as well designed and robust as they ought to be...
By contrast, Vesna Vulovic fell 33,000 with no parachute to help her, and she also lived.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9496466/stewardess-terror-fell...
https://owlcation.com/stem/Drag-Force-and-the-Terminal-Veloc...
https://martin-baker.com/ejection-tie-club/
There are some good stories on that page.
It is strange that the part that strikes me the most though is this one:
"The Coast Guard amphibian gained altitude and flew off. (I learned later that he headed for a squadron of minesweepers that was returning to the United States from a tour of the Western Pacific. He was unable to tune to their radio frequency for communications. But this ingenious pilot lowered a wire from his aircraft and dragged it across the bow of the minesweeper, the USS Embattle. The minesweeper captain understood the plea, and veered off at top speed in my direction.)"
That is such a fascinating operational ingenuity by the pilot and the captain, I am thoroughly impressed!
I for one really enjoyed reading this story, it was quite exciting and I never noticed anything 'wordy' about it. I thought it was very well written.
In modern day and age, this would frequently be shared as a 20word phrase on tranquil image background on Facebook.
Compared to that, this is "wordy" - which some of us will enjoy (I did too:), others will not.
"As I was looking around, I was struck for an instant by the eeriness of the scene: here I was, attached, like an unwanted child, by an umbilicus to a gargantuan mother who was fleeing across the sky at 200 knots as though from some unnamed danger. Far below us was a broken layer of clouds that filtered the sun glare over the Pacific."
Wonderfully poetic and I enjoyed it, but yes, wordy.
You've basically redefined the word so that it no longer has any meaning.
I like long form. I like essays and articles and geeking out and getting in depth of things. But I'm not oblivious that majority of media consumption is swiping on TikTok or Instagram or Facebook.
[0]https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/374887/meaning-o...
* Wordy is bad
* There's no room in this world for wordy/long-form
* I am a proponent of 20-word Facebook posts, they are awesome and a pinnacle of human achievement and we should all use them going forward
I have not made such a claim in the initial post and have made substantial effort to explicitly indicate thusly since. Lord knows nobody ever labeled me as "succinct" :-D
My old co-worker had a term "We are in violent agreement", and I feel that's what's happening here :->
A “shot across the bows” is a colloquial expression for a warning demanding imminent action. The idea was that long ago if you couldn't communicate with some other ship, your last ditch effort to tell them to stop “or else” was to fire a cannonball over the nose (the bow) of the ship, so that you do not damage the ship but they would definitely see it and know you mean business.
So I imagine someone on this plane using the colloquial expression was just like “dammit! Follow us!! What more of a shot across the bows do you need?!” And someone else was like “you mean a literal one? I have some cable here, you drag that a few meters above the deck I bet it will make a terrible noise.” or something.
From what you’re explaining, the expression wasn’t something necessarily standardized “code yellow” sort of thing. Could two novices been able to convey or comprehend the meaning between themselves?
With stories like this, who needs film!
Maybe not for a towed line, though the shot across the bow is probably intuitive. That's essentially the same thing bees will do to warn you away from their hive.
The expression has somehow always felt more like a frontal attack that stops right before actually hitting you. But my head may have conflated it with "jemandem etwas vor den Latz knallen," which translates to "slap something in front of somebody's bib."
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lualualei_VLF_transmitter 1. https://twitter.com/lemonodor/status/1312134472280633345 2. https://twitter.com/thenewarea51/status/1347668162406477824
It's a lot easier to read if you add `line-height: 1.8em` to the body tag style.
Or maybe it's just all "luck", as many opined.
I would hope ejector seats do the same. If so, the fault must be with the mechanical part. But OP does not describe the cabin filling with dense white smoke as you'd expect from a rocket propelled ejector seat.
That tells me someone made a major design mistake with the seat... and yet the US military decided not to go dig up the seat to find what went wrong with it.
Thats baaaaad...