For non-americans: 15 000 feet is 4.5km.
Thanks! Why hasn't anyone developed an auto-converter for comments? :)
I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
231–240 of 252 posts
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Controlled risks, bah humbug! If you think Everest is a controlled risk, do not go there, you are severely underestimating the risks and you would die.
The crazies up here do it in kayaks, which is pretty amusing. I will/do kayak but I'm not doing that.
Kayaking up Mt.Everest? Okay, now that is what I call crazy.
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#233Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That there was a mechanical failure, + 2 failures on the ejection, and a parachute failure - is not a fluke. This is an extreme dereliction of duty by design and/or maintenance teams. Re: Ejector seat, it could also have been pilot error, if he had forgotten to take the safety pins out of the ejector system during his pre flight check. They are there specifically to prevent the ejection rocket from firing while mai…
I doubt anyone could've missed a pin with a big red tag (flag) attached to it. It can't be missed.
Yeah. "Can't possibly happen" until it does.
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Students have known that since the dawn of time. It's why they don't work until the night before the deadline, when the urgency is enough to allow them use 200% or their brain's capacities in order to obtain a passing grade. The cherry on top: they can now spend the time until their next deadline thinking about the amazing grades they would get if they worked more than one night per month. Source: me
Cortisol does wonders, but only for the short term. It basically destroys part of your body to supercharge the rest. Later on in life, plenty of companies try to make use of it, pushing people into long hours and short deadlines, and find that it doesn't work as well.
>>pushing people into long hours and short deadlines, and find that it doesn't work as well.
That is because you need some skin in the game. Nobody is losing sleep to work on a project whose success or failure has no disproportionate effect on the well being of the individual.
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
The crazies up here do it in kayaks, which is pretty amusing. I will/do kayak but I'm not doing that.
Kayaking up Mt.Everest? Okay, now that is what I call crazy.
LOL nah, getting their thrill on. They drop in off pretty high cliffs and go through rapids and even over waterfalls. They usually survive.
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what way do you (or drzaiusapelord, if you see this) think that the boat operator was in any way at fault? There doesn't seem to be any indication of that in the NTSB report[1], and the newspaper report states that the boat was in the channel. [1] https://app.ntsb.gov/pdfgenerator/ReportGeneratorFile.ashx?E...
I don't really place blame with any one thing, but a mix of a bunch of factors. For the boat, they were motoring much closer to the side with the runway, instead of the side further away. Its not technically wrong, but if they were exercising any caution at all would have been farther away and likely out of our glideslope. On our side, we should have checked more deliberately that nothing was in our path. On base, I…
It seems that an exclusion zone could and should have been established in the vicinity of this approach, but to say that the boat operator was not "exercising any caution at all" is quite a stretch. Boats traveling in channels have a set of regulations to follow, which include keeping to the side when not crossing.
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#238While not nearly as dramatic, this story reminds me a serious accident I had in my early childhood. For a long time I thought that perhaps I did die and that I had continued life in a near identical parallel dimension while leaving friends and relatives mourning in the one I had been born in. I wonder if this thought ever occurred to the pilot. A fantastic read.
I guess we're wandering a bit from the topic, but I used to feel the same way about, of all things, that childhood pastime of spinning around with your arms out. I spent more time than I'm comfortable specifying believing that every revolution put me in a slightly different universe, and that in order to get back, I'd have to perform exactly as many counter-revolutions in the opposite direction. While this may sound…
Haha, wonderful. It's a an appealing thought I must say. What if the the "right" maneuvers in space actually open inter-dimensional portals. Sounds like we could've made good friends.
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you. I was kind of hoping someone would have suggestions for further reading. :)
Alastair Reynolds wrote a short story with this as an element. I think it's in Zima Blue . Greg Egan goes into such things at length in Permutation City .
Thanks, I'm looking forward to some inter-dimensional reading!
Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived
#240The human body can sustain a surprising amount of damage and still carry on. Three different wingsuit pilots have survived unintentionally crashing into trees with no parachute out now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3YLdhraPw https://vimeo.com/50817449 (view at 6:35) http://www.basejumper.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2994... And then you have Jeb Corliss crashing full speed into a mountain and surviving: htt…
That's the first thing I thought when I read about his injuries - the human body is remarkably fragile in most instances, but when it comes to the crunch, something often allows it to take a truly staggering amount of injury without dying. Some people's survival abilities are astonishing.
Sadly a lot of it is down to chance - speed and angle he hit the water, for example - and would be very difficult to ever repeat.