Jul 18
Unplanned Freefall?
Snow is good-soft, deep, drifted snow. Snow is lovely. Remember that you are the pilot and your body is the aircraft. By tilting forward and putting your hands at your side, you can modify your pitch and make progress not just vertically but horizontally as well. As you go down 15,000 feet, you can also go sideways two-thirds of that distance-that’s two miles! Choose your landing zone. You be the boss.
What to do if the plane you are travelling in suffers what the engineers coyly call “catastrophic integrity failure.” Meaning that you’ve suddenly got bigger problems than the yakker in the next seat.
If you keep your wits about you, though, and employ these elementary principles of physics . . . well, you’ll probably end up like a smashed bug anyway.
Yet people have survived falls from a similar or even greater height before. Here’s how they did it.
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I always figured that if I worked in a Very Tall Building, I would keep a simple parachute in my office for fire or other evacuation emergencies. Obviously the jump, to say nothing of the landing, would be made under less than ideal conditions. But could you imagine if one of the guys in the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center had a parachute? With all the world watching, and assuming he could fight off his officemates while he made his leap, he would be the most famous parachutist since Dan “D.B.” Cooper. Instead of a greasy hole in World Trade Center Plaza and an incoming missile for the unfortunate rescue teams to dodge.