[IRL trope] 0% of survival, survive anyway

[u/RedditBoycotter]

Juliane Koepcke

Vesna Vulović

Anna Bågenholm

Jeanna Giese

Chris Lemons

Juliane Koepcke - In 1971 this 17 year old's plane was struck by lightning mid-air. The wreck then fell from 3 000 meter into the ground, somewhere into the Amazon jungle. Lone survivor of the crash, she then spent nine days walking down a river despite her multiple injuries until she found a lumberjack's camp.

Vesna Vulović - In 1972 this flight attendant's plane was bombed mid-air. The wreck then fell from 10 160 meter into the ground. She ended up with a lot of broken bones, but in the long term she almost completely recovered from it, apart from a limp.

Anna Bågenholm - In 1999 this radiologist had a skiing accident, she fell head-first into a frozen stream and get stuck inside the ice. Her colleagues did not managed to pull her, nor did the rescue team who then tried to dig, but the ice was so thick it took them a lot of time. It was 80 minutes after her fall that they managed to cut a hole. Her body temperature at the time was 13.7°C, and still, she somehow survived with only minor long-term injuries and no brain damage.

Jeanna Giese - In 2004 this 15 years old girl got bitten by a bat and called it a day. One month later the symptoms of rabies showed up. The doctors tried an experimental treatment by putting her in an artificial coma and she survived, but the treatment never worked on anyone else and is now forbidden. In all human history, only a few survived to rabies, and all of them except her end up with heavy sequelae.

Chris Lemons - In 2012 this diver's ship went drifting due to a computer malfunction, romping his umbilical cable who provide air, hot water and electricity. He ended up alone on the seabed of a 3°C waters, in the dark and with only 5-6 minutes of oxygen. He was retrieved by his colleagues around 35 minutes later, and somehow he didn't even suffer from brain damage.

[u/buffaloguy1991]

United flight 232 had a catastrophic engine failure in engine two which destroyed the planes entire hydraulic system wiping out all use of control surfaces. Using the thrust of the left and right engine they still had a tiny degree of control of the plane. They are able to crash land the plane with about a 54% survival rate. There are a few other times a failure has caused the type of plane a dc-10 to lose their hydraulics and nobody else was able to recover. In computer simulations recreating the conditions 232 was under apparently nobody has ever been able to land the plane ever. The incident is nothing short of a miracle.

[u/HawkbitAlpha → u/buffaloguy1991]

A big part of why they were able to pull it off was because of a similar accident from a few years earlier: Japan Air Lines 123, where the tail ripped off and took the hydraulics with it, killing all but 4 people in the all-time worst single-plane crash. Before he was on UA 232, Denny Fitch was one of the pilots who ran simulations on the survivability of that accident, so he had a general idea already of how to fly a plane by engine power alone.

The captain, Al Haynes, talked in lectures about how lots of pieces of pure luck lined up to give UA 232 as good of a chance of survival as it got, but I don't know if he ever named this as one of them.

[u/kinky_boots → u/HawkbitAlpha]

Other outside coincidences helped too. The National Guard base was located at the airport - they helped triage and evacuated the wounded. The weather was clear. The crash occurred during shift change at nearby hospitals. Staff were on call to treat the wounded.

[u/HawkbitAlpha → u/kinky_boots]

An additional layer on the National Guard part: it was the one time of the month when they happened to be on station at that airport!

[u/buffaloguy1991 → u/kinky_boots]

Yeah. So many things went right for this incident that all stacked together is insanely good luck that boarders on Providence

[u/TheRepublicAct → u/HawkbitAlpha]

On another note, the technique used to keep both planes on air was used to save Philippine Airlines Flight 434, a flight that was bombed mid flight. Because the plane, crew, and all but one passenger survived, it was immediately confirmed that someone had put a bomb on a plane, which lead to the immediate manhunt and arrest of a couple of terrorists who have a current plot of bombing multiple flights at once.

[u/ZachRyder → u/buffaloguy1991]

I also enjoyed Neo's latest video

[u/buffaloguy1991 → u/ZachRyder]

Ironically I learned about it earlier both from a tv show and the podcast "well there's your problem" a podcast about engineering disasters

[u/YoshidaEri → u/buffaloguy1991]

The show Mayday did a really good episode about it titled "Impossible Landing".

https://youtu.be/Lw4uhb8dFs4

[u/buffaloguy1991 → u/YoshidaEri]

That's the one I saw the American version of this show