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Comment by glxxyz | Hacker News Reader

Stories of people surviving falls from planes 'without a parachute' are inevitably somewhat exaggerated- they survived a fall with a partially functional parachute. Her injuries were horrific and it's incredible that she and the baby survived, but with no parachute at all at terminal velocity (at least 120mph) there would have been few pieces of her left large enough to scrape up.

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Never say never: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87

I didn’t say ‘never’, these stories are generally exaggerated, for example:

“Investigators believed that the fuselage, with Vulović pinned inside, landed at an angle in a heavily wooded and snow-covered mountainside, which cushioned the impact”

Again incredible that she survived but she was inside some piece of plane which sounds like it both protected her and slowed her fall.

Wikipedia summarizes what I was getting at:

“Over the years, other skydivers have survived accidents where the press has reported that no parachute was open, yet they were actually being slowed by a small area of tangled parachute. They might still be very lucky to survive, but an impact at 130 km/h (80 mph) is much less severe than the 190 km/h (120 mph) that might occur in normal freefall”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_(accident)#Surviving...

Or https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliane_Koepcke There is a movie about this accident by Werner Herzog, but you have to watch it cum grano salis.

“Experts have said that she survived the fall because she was harnessed into her seat, the window seat, which was attached to the two seats to her left as part of a row of three. That was thought to have functioned as a parachute which slowed her fall.”

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