No Parachute: The Highest Falls People Survived
On January 3, 1943, an American B-17F Flying Fortress bomber named “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” was conducting a daylight bombing run over Saint-Nazaire in France. After the aircraft was damaged by flak, airman Alan Magee bailed out, only to discover that his parachute was torn and useless. He was miraculously thrown clear of the doomed bomber and he was quickly rendered unconcious from a lack of oxygen due to the high altitude. Magee plummeted all the way to earth, crashing through the glass ceiling of St. Nazaire’s train station before falling onto the ground below it. He was taken prisoner with 28 shrapnel wounds, several broken bones, severe damage to his nose and eye, a nearly severed arm and damage to lung and kidneys but incredibly he survived, passing away in 2003.
Magee wasn’t the only person who managed to somehow survive a fall from an aircraft at high altitude without a parachute during the Second World War. Ivan Chisov was a Soviet Air Force lieutenant who was forced to abandon an IL-4 bomber which was attacked by German fighter aircraft. He quickly fell unconscious, plummeting 23,000 feet before striking the edge of a snowy ravine at an estimated 240 km/h, sliding and rolling all the way to the bottom. His suffered severe injuries but he survived the fall and died in 1986.
Nicholas Alkemade, a rear gunner in a Royal Air Force Lancaster bomber, had a similarly remarkable story. His aircraft came under attack from Luftwaffe night fighters over Germany in 1944 and he had to make the decision to jump from the burning bomber. His parachute quickly went up in flames, rendering it useless and Alkemade fell 18,000 feet through the night sky. His fall was broken by pine trees above a soft blanket of snow and all he suffered was a sprained leg. Initially the Germans didn’t believe his story but he eventually became a celebrated prisoner of war and he also went on to live a long life, dying in 1987.
Vesna Vulović is more than likely the person who holds the record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. The Yugoslavian flight attendant was the sole survivor of a bomb placed onboard JAT Flight 367 in 1972 which destroyed the airliner. Experts think she survived the fall after getting trapped by a food cart inside a section of the aircraft’s fuselage which fell 33,330 feet before landing at an angle on a heavily wooded and snowy mountainside in Czechoslovakia. She spent several days in a coma and was hospitalized for several months with a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, broken legs, broken ribs, and a fractured pelvis. She eventually recovered from her severe injuries and died in Belgrade in December 2016.
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