FALLS are not an exact science.
What’s safe for a trained stuntman is not the same for a grandparent – but there is a threshold where just about all falls become fatal.
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If you lean back in your seat too far, you can immediately experience how innately terrifying falling can be.
There is reason behind human instinct – falls are the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths, according to the World Health Organization.
Falls from short distances, like ladders and low scaffolds, can be dangerous or even fatal.
On the flip, there are validated stories of people falling from planes and surviving – so, what’s in a fall?
Who’s falling?
The two groups most at risk of injury or death due to a fall are kids under 15 and elderly people over 65.
For kids, curiosity about their environment and body compels them to explore heights they may not realize are dangerous.
Meanwhile, elderly people have a much more physiological reason for being injured by a fall – they lack the agility to react and the bone density to support their weight when they do hit the ground.
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Heights
Building heights are measured in stories: one storey is about 12 to 14 feet.
All falls pose risk, even just from a standing position – but falls greater than one story are of especially serious concern, not to mention traumatic for any witnesses.
Four-story falls – about 48 feet – have a mortality rate of 50%.
Increasing the height naturally has an inverse relationship with the likelihood of survival – you have just a 10% chance of surviving a seven-story fall.
A study done in Paris in 2005 found that falls of eight stories or greater were 100% fatal.
“Most people who fall from a height die because they fracture their spine near the top and so transect the aorta which carries blood out of the heart,” a trauma expert told The Guardian.
Landing
Brett Pritt, a licensed physical therapist and administrator of the site scienceoffalling.com, told The Sun that the key to avoiding injury in a fall is an agile landing.
Pritt advises that, if possible, a person coming to land should “disperse the force of the fall over the largest amount of time along the most amount of the body tissue that you can,” with a controlled squat and roll.
Parkour athletes, who deliberately jump off high surfaces, apply this technique regularly.
But this requires special training and years of practice. You should never intentionally fall – even skilled parkour professionals can be injured or die while jumping.
And ultimately, it’s not just how you land, but what you land on.
The landing zone
The forgivingness of the surface that you land on will greatly impact your landing strategy and the likelihood of survival.
Alan Magee was a World War 2 pilot who miraculously survived a 22,000 fall over Germany – he landed on a glass roof, which absorbed some of the energy of his fall as it shattered.
But, glass planes are much less common than asphalt or bodies of water.
On rigid surfaces, luck becomes a big factor – and your state of consciousness.
A man survived being thrown more than 1,300 feet by a tornado because he was knocked unconscious, and his body did not tighten up as he dropped to the field where he was found.
“If you’re falling from those nightmare fall heights, you kind of want to go as limp as possible and just hope for the best,” Pritt told The Sun.
For water landings, “try to make yourself as streamlined as possible, like a bullet,” Pritt said. “[Point] your toes down and just try to cut through the water so that there isn’t as much impact.”
Nine lives
Cats, famously agile pets that always land on their feet, have been recorded surviving falls from 32 stories.
Insider reported on a study that found cats sustain less severe injuries when falling from greater than seven stories.
It’s counterintuitive – how can cats be at less risk when falling greater distances?
It’s not the fact they have nine lives: it’s a mixture of instincts and physics.
Terminal velocity – when air resistance nullifies the effects of gravity – is a scientific component of all objects falling through air, liquid or other matter.
Once a falling object has reached terminal velocity, it will not pick up any more speed during its descent.
Cats attempt to land on their feet when falling from short to medium heights, but at terminal velocity, they splay their limbs out “like a parachuter.”
The higher distance gives the cat more time to react and soften its landing.
Accessibility to emergency care will play a role in surviving a fall from extreme heights.
While dozens of factors contribute to the outcome of a fall, few may be more salient than luck.
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