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I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

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21–30 of 274 posts

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#21
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dicky Ecklund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicky_Eklund

"Any time we talking boxers, East Coast Elites gotta bring up Dicky Eklund. Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, that's all you hear. Stop with your Dicky Eklund, everybody know it be George Chuvalo!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chuvalo

Where is the quote from? Sounds familiar.

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#22
In a story of insane luck (and unluck!), the craziest part is definitely this

" He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#23
post #17

Quoted post unavailable.

Are you serious? How long do you need this title to be?

There is a long standing tradition on HN to complain about titles that don't totally and completely accurately capture the message of the article, such that the article is a mere 1000 word bit of fluff to the tweet-sized message itself. Any title short of that measure is clickbait or just wrong. Best option is to ignore them.

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#25

Still not as impressive as Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant who holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 m (33,330 ft; 6.31 mi) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87

Remarkable, yes, but I wouldn’t use “impressive” for either fall. Surviving such ordeals is (almost) 100% luck.

I would use impressive for cases where the main subject has considerable influence in the outcome, as, for example, Ernest Shackleton had, or as people lost at sea for months with very limited resources had.

(In this case, the part where he survives while in the ocean may be impressive, but I have no idea how hard that was)

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#26

In a story of insane luck (and unluck!), the craziest part is definitely this " He said that if I had had a spleen, it almost certainly would have ruptured when I hit the water, and I would have bled to death. Of the 25 pilots in our squadron, I am the only one without a spleen. It gives me something to think about. Maybe it does you as well."

Wow.. so much bad luck (the original failure, ejection failure, parachute failure) countered by that much luck (not hitting the plane during "manual" eject, not bleeding to death because havin his spleen removed 4 years earlier) ..amazing unbelievable story with some good end :)

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#27
post #21
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Any time we talking boxers, East Coast Elites gotta bring up Dicky Eklund. Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, Dicky Eklund, that's all you hear. Stop with your Dicky Eklund, everybody know it be George Chuvalo!" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Chuvalo

Where is the quote from? Sounds familiar.

https://youtu.be/gv7mO41bbPg?t=74

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#28
post #7

The whole description is wordy but astonishing. It is strange that the part that strikes me the most though is this one: "The Coast Guard amphibian gained altitude and flew off. (I learned later that he headed for a squadron of minesweepers that was returning to the United States from a tour of the Western Pacific. He was unable to tune to their radio frequency for communications. But this ingenious pilot lowered a w…

I was under the impression that for non-surfaced subs the only way to communicate them was to fly close to the surface and lower a boom into the water. Is that not the case?

These aren't subs, they are ships. I would imagine the plane circled overhead at a low altitude several times, tried to get their attention, kept going away and seeing if they would follow, kept going back when they didn't. And people on the ship were probably looking up being like, “what's his deal?”

A “shot across the bows” is a colloquial expression for a warning demanding imminent action. The idea was that long ago if you couldn't communicate with some other ship, your last ditch effort to tell them to stop “or else” was to fire a cannonball over the nose (the bow) of the ship, so that you do not damage the ship but they would definitely see it and know you mean business.

So I imagine someone on this plane using the colloquial expression was just like “dammit! Follow us!! What more of a shot across the bows do you need?!” And someone else was like “you mean a literal one? I have some cable here, you drag that a few meters above the deck I bet it will make a terrible noise.” or something.

Re: I Fell 15,000 Feet and Lived (2009)

#30

Still not as impressive as Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant who holds the Guinness world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute: 10,160 m (33,330 ft; 6.31 mi) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovi%C4%87

There was also a lady who fell 15,000 ft after two parachute malfunctions, only to land on a colony of fire ants who preceded to sting her back to life (apparently).

> Paramedics brought a barely conscious Joan to Carolinas Medical Center for emergency treatment. Doctors determined that repeated fire ant stings luckily shocked her heartbeat and stimulated her nerves. The insect assault kept her heart beating and her organs functioning long enough to keep her alive during transport, where she fell into a comatose state.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180313145230/skydiving.com/new...

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