20,000 feet fall w/ no parachute

[kaki3152]

Just found this on the Web:

"Alan Magee was a ball turret gunner on an American B-17 bomber that was shot up and began spinning out of control over France on Jan. 3, 1943. Magee's parachute was unusable, but he jumped anyway, losing consciousness as he fell about 20,000 feet. He crashed through the glass skylight of the St. Nazaire train station and suffered severe injuries. Yet Magee recovered, enjoying backpacking until his death at age 84. Magee's 4-mile plunge was well-documented, but it's not clear how he survived. Some believe the angle of the skylight deflected his fall."

I have heard of a Lancaster crewman who bailed out w/out a parachute and landed in the snow relatively uninjured. Or the Yugoslav stewardess who survived a similar fall when her airliner suffered a bomb attack in mid air.

[richard.k]

In March 1945, a RCAF mid upper gunner fell with a 16 foot piece of fuselage from 18,000 plus feet into a forest and survived. The cold night in the forest kept bleeding to a minimum. Hence is licence plate reads "No Chute"

[cz_raf]

It happened on 26. 1.1972 over Czechoslovakia. Douglas DC-9 flying from Stockholm to Belgrade has a bomb aboard with intention to kill Yugoslavian minister.
Steward Vesna Vulovicova was preparing a dinner in the moment of explosion and she was thrown into the tail part and fall from 10 km. She probably survived as the tail part slide down from a slope. Her legs were broken but she was trying to get of of the wreckage when the ambulance arrived.

There are also some rumours that the plane was not flying so high but only in several hundreds of meters and was shot down by Czechoslovak AA rackets...

Pavel

[Amrit1]

Originally Posted by kaki3152

I have heard of a Lancaster crewman who bailed out w/out a parachute and landed in the snow relatively uninjured.

F/Sgt Nicholas Alkemade

http://www.thepeoplenews.com/July08/page18.html

[kaki3152]

Ok, one more, Juliane Margaret Koepcke who survived the breakup of a LANSA L-188 Electra over the Amazon
http://www.super70s.com/Super70s/Tec...-24(Lansa).asp

[Ex Shack]

Alkemade's survival was documented by the German's who suspected that he was not Aircrew until one of them noticed that the hooks on his parachute harness, to which the chute would have been attached for use, were still fastened in place by the loops of cotton that prevented them coming out of their stowage until the parachute opened. They then went to the wreckage of the a/c and found the metal parts of a parachute where he had told them they would. He left the a/c deliberately because ihe rear fuselage was on fire and he preferred to fall to his death rather than be burned, the Germans issued him with a document confirming his story. The story is told in a book by Paul Brickhill and Conrad Norton, "Escape to Danger", published in 1946. The publication was allowed that early,I suspect, because the book also included the first telling of the incident that we now call "The Great Escape" which Brickhill, on his own, wrote more fully later.
Regards
Dick

[Kutscha]

Pilot Officer Andrew Charles Mynarski and F/O George (Pat) Brophy.

http://www.spitcrazy.com/andrewmynarskistory.htm