Mary Roach - Stiff

Statistics from Flight 800 sketched a similar scenario: Most of the bodies displayed the telltale internal injuries of extreme water impact. All had blunt chest injuries, 99 percent had multiple broken ribs, 88 percent had lacerated lungs, and 73 percent had injured aortas.

If a brutal impact against the water’s surface was what killed most passengers, does that mean they were alive and aware of their circumstances during the three-minute drop to the sea? Alive, perhaps.

“If you define alive as heart pumping and them breathing,” says Shanahan, “there might have been a significant number.” Aware? Dennis doesn’t think so. “I think it’s very remote. The seats and the passengers are being tossed around. You’d just get overwhelmed.” Shanahan has made a point of asking the hundreds of plane and car crash survivors he interviews what they felt and observed during their accident. “I’ve come to the general conclusion that they don’t have a whole lot of awareness that they’ve been severely traumatized. I find them very detached.

They’re aware of a lot of things going on, but they give you this kind of ethereal response—’I knew what was going on, but I didn’t really know what was going on. I didn’t particularly feel like I was a part of it, but on the other hand I knew I was a part of it.’”

Given that so many Flight 800 passengers were thrown clear of the plane as it broke apart, I wondered whether they stood a chance—however slim—of surviving. If you hit the water like an Olympic diver, might it be possible to survive a fall from a high-flying plane? It has happened at least once. In 1963, our man of the long-distance plummet, Richard Snyder, turned his attention to people who had survived falls from normally fatal heights. In “Human Survivability of Extreme Impacts in Free-Fall,” he reports the case of a man who fell seven miles from an airplane and survived, albeit for only half a day. And this poor sap didn’t have the relative luxury of a water landing. He hit ground. (From that height, in fact, there is little difference.) What Snyder found is that a person’s speed at impact doesn’t dependably predict the severity of his or her injuries. He spoke with eloping bridegrooms who sustained more debilitating injuries falling off their ladders than did a suicidal thirty-six-year-old who dropped seventy-one feet onto concrete. The latter walked away needing nothing more than Band-Aids and a therapist.

Generally speaking, people falling from planes have booked their final flight. According to Snyder’s paper, the maximum speed at which a human being has a respectable shot at surviving a feet-first—that’s the safest position—fall into water is about 70 mph. Given that the terminal velocity of a falling body is 120 mph, and that it takes only five hundred feet to reach that speed, you are probably not going to fall five miles from an exploding plane and live to be interviewed by Dennis Shanahan.

Was Shanahan right about Flight 800? He was. Over time, critical pieces of the plane were recovered, and the wreckage supported his findings.

The final determination: Sparks from frayed wiring had ignited fuel vapors, causing an explosion of one of the fuel tanks.

The unjolly science of injury analysis got its start in 1954, the year two British Comet airliners mysteriously dropped from the sky into the sea.

The first plane vanished in January, over Elba, the second off Naples three months later. In both crashes, owing to the depth of the water, authorities were unable to recover much of the wreckage and so turned for clues to the “medical evidence”: the injuries of the twenty-one passengers recovered from the surface of the sea.

The investigation was carried out at Britain’s Royal Air Force Institute of Aviation Medicine in Farnborough, by the organization’s group captain, W K. Stewart, in conjunction with one Sir Harold E. Whittingham, director of medical services for the British Overseas Airways Corporation. As Sir Harold held the most degrees—five are listed on the published paper, not counting the knighthood—I will, out of respect, assume him to have been the team leader.

Sir Harold and his team were immediately struck by the uniformity of the corpses’ injuries. All twenty-one cadavers showed relatively few external wounds and quite severe internal injuries, particularly to the lungs. Three conditions were known to cause lung injuries such as those found in the Comet bodies: bomb blast, sudden decompression—as happens when pressurization of an airplane cabin fails—and a fall from extreme heights. Any one of them, in a crash like these, was a possibility.

So far, the dead weren’t doing much to clear up the mystery.

The bomb possibility was the first to be ruled out. None of the bodies were burned, none had been penetrated with bomb-generated shrapnel, and none had been, as Dennis Shanahan would put it, highly fragmented.

The insane, grudge-bearing, explosives-savvy former Comet employee theory quickly bit the dust.

Next the team considered sudden depressurization of the passenger cabin. Could this possibly cause such severe lung damage? To find out, the Farnborough team recruited a group of guinea pigs and exposed them to a sudden simulated pressure drop—from sea level to 35,000 feet.

To quote Sir Harold, “The guinea pigs appeared mildly startled by the experience but showed no signs of respiratory distress.” Data from other facilities, based on both animal experimentation and human experiences, showed similarly few deleterious effects—certainly not the kind of damage seen in the lungs of the Comet passengers.

This left our friend “extreme water impact” as the likely cause of death, and a high-altitude cabin breakup, presumably from some structural flaw, as the likely cause of the crash. As Richard Snyder wouldn’t write

“Fatal Injuries Resulting from Extreme Water Impact” for another fourteen years, the Farnborough team turned once again to guinea pigs.

Sir Harold wanted to find out exactly what happens to lungs that hit water at terminal velocity. When I first saw mention of the animals, I pictured Sir Harold trekking to the cliffs of Dover, rodent cages in tow, and hurling the unsuspecting creatures into the seas below, where his companions awaited in rowboats with nets. But Sir Harold had more sense than I; he and his men devised a “vertical catapult” to achieve the necessary forces in a far shorter distance. “The guinea pigs,” he wrote, “were lightly secured by strips of adhesive paper to the under surface of the carrier so that, when the latter was arrested to the lower limit of its excursion, the guinea pig was projected belly first, about 2½ feet through the air before hitting the water.” I know just the sort of little boy Sir Harold was.

To make a long story short, the catapulted guinea pigs’ lungs looked a lot like the Comet passengers’ lungs. The researchers concluded that the planes had broken apart at altitude, spilling most of their human contents into the sea. To figure out exactly where the fuselage had broken apart, they looked at whether the passengers had been clothed or naked when pulled from the sea. Sir Harold’s theory was that hitting the sea from a height of several miles would knock one’s clothes off, but that hitting the sea inside the largely intact tail of the plane would not, and that they could therefore surmise the point of breakup as the dividing line between clothed and naked cadavers. For in both flights, it was the passengers determined (by checking the seating chart) to have been in the back of the plane who wound up floating in their clothes, while passengers seated forward of a certain point were found floating naked, or practically so.

To prove his theory, Sir Harold lacked one key piece of data: Was it indeed true that hitting the sea after falling from an airplane would serve to knock one’s clothes off? Ever the pioneer, Sir Harold undertook the study himself. Though I would like nothing better than to be able to relate to you the details of another Farnborough guinea pig study, this one featuring the little rodents outfitted in tiny worsted suits and 1950s dresses, in point of fact no guinea pigs were used. The Royal Aircraft Establishment was enlisted to pilot a group of fully clothed dummies to cruising altitude and drop them into the sea. [19] You are perhaps wondering, as I did, whether cadavers were ever used to document the effects of accidental free falls on humans. The closest I came to a paper like this was J. C. Earley’s “Body Terminal Velocity,” dated 1964, and J. S. Cotner’s “Analysis of Air Resistance Effects on the Velocity of Falling Human Bodies,” from 1962, both, alas, unpublished. I do know that when J. C. Earley used dummies in a study, he used “Dummies” in the title, and so I suspect that a few donated corpses did indeed make the plunge for science. As Sir Harold had expected, their clothes were indeed blown off on impact, a phenomenon verified by Marin County coroner Gary Erickson, the man who autopsies the bodies of Golden Gate Bridge suicides: Even after falling just 250 feet, he told me, “typically the shoes get blown off, the crotch gets blown out of the pants, one or both of the rear pockets are gone.”