An incredible incident occurred during a military exercise in southern Peru. Paratrooper Amasifuen Gamarra, 31, survived a fall from a height of 1,500 meters, AFP reported.
In the air, when the sergeant tried to open the parachute, the canopy did not open, and the lines were wrapped around his neck. The parachutist lost consciousness and fell to the ground.
At the same time, the officer of the Peruvian Air Force not only survived, but practically did not suffer. The doctors diagnosed him with only a dislocated ankle. “We do not know how the fall happened, but it does not have a single fracture. It is a real miracle that he is alive. It was God's will,”said the ambulance doctor Guillermo Pacheco.
The sergeant is currently in a military hospital, where he is undergoing additional examination.
Lucky ones
On January 26, 1972, all news agencies around the world reported an explosion over the Czech city of Srpska-Kamenice at an altitude of 10,160 meters of a Yugoslavian DC-9 passenger aircraft en route from Copenhagen to Zagreb.
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The cause of the tragedy was a bomb hidden aboard the air liner by Croatian terrorists - the Ustasha. The chances of surviving such disasters are very, very small, and usually reports about them end with the same phrase: "Everyone on board died." But a sensation swept the world - 22-year-old flight attendant Vesna Vulovich survived, having fallen from a great height. A relatively "soft" landing was provided by snow-covered tree crowns, which cushioned the impact of the fuselage debris. True, the girl regained consciousness only a month later.
Spring was lucky not only in the fact that the plane fell on snow-covered trees, but also in the fact that one of the local residents who worked in a German field hospital during the Second World War and knew the basics of first aid was the first at the scene of the accident. It was he who found barely breathing Vulovich among the dead bodies of passengers, and gave her first aid. This is probably what saved her life. But for a long time the doctors did not believe that she would survive. Even when Spring came to her senses, there were doubts about this. But the days passed, and the young body was more and more confident to cope with the injuries.
In total, there are several dozen such people around the world, not counting those who survived accidents during takeoff and landing of aircraft. Here is a short list of the most famous facts, most of which fall on the period of World War II.
In 1942, a Soviet Il-4 bomber was shot down in an air battle. The navigator of the crew, Ivan Chisov, left the plane at an altitude of over 7,000 meters. The parachute opened as it should, but found itself in the path of the burning car. Then Chisov fell without a parachute. He was saved by a thick snow cover and a slope of a deep ravine, where the lucky one slipped at a rather acute angle.
In May 1943, the British Ventura bomber was shot down over Holland. The plane fell apart, and its debris rushed down. The tail of the car, where the shooter William Stannard was, was slightly damaged, very successfully hit the air stream and made an almost "soft landing". The pilot escaped with only bruises.
In November of the same year, during a raid on Bremen, an American B-17 bomber was shot down by German anti-aircraft artillery fire. The parachute of one of the crew members - Eugene Moran - was damaged and he could not use it, so he fell down with the car. The trees softened the blow. Moran was taken prisoner, spent four months in German hospitals, but survived.
In March 1944, during a raid on Germany, the plane of the Englishman Nicholas Elkimade was shot down. The pilot wanted to escape by parachute, but he did not open up. The impact on the ground after falling from a height of more than 5 kilometers was softened by spruce and a snowdrift about half a meter thick. Surprisingly, there was no break, although the free fall speed was no less than 150 kilometers per hour. In the military press, where this case was widely described, Elquimade was not called anything other than a "surviving candidate for the dead".
In April 1944, during another raid, a German Luftwaffe fighter destroyed an American B-24 bomber. Three pilots on board could not use parachutes and, together with the wreckage of the car, fell from a height of more than 5 kilometers. Two pilots were killed, but Merle Hasenfratz survived, having escaped with broken legs and a broken eye.
In the same April, an American B-24 bomber was shot down over Austria. The damaged plane went into a tailspin, which prevented two pilots - Gerald Duval and John Wells - from leaving the dying car. The bomber fell to the ground from a height of over 7 kilometers and completely collapsed. However, both pilots survived, although they were seriously injured.
The fall from a height of more than 8 kilometers for the pilot of the American B-17 bomber Federico Gonzales, who was shot down in January 1945 over Dusseldorf, did not end so well. Having been wounded, he could not leave the burning car and fell to the ground with it. Gonzales survived, but died a few days later in the hospital.
In February 1945, two American B-17 bombers collided over Austria. The shooter of one of the cars, Erwin Kosiesarek, was blocked in the tail section, could not leave the plane and fell with him from a height of more than 8 kilometers. The German soldiers were most amazed when Kosiensarek emerged from the rubble unharmed. Naturally, he was immediately captured.
Two more American B-17 bombers collided in the same month over Belgium. One of the pilots Joe Jones fell to the ground from a height of about 4 kilometers. He was seriously injured, ended up in a field hospital, where he regained consciousness a few days later. But he survived.
And the last episode of the wartime. Another American B-17 bomber was shot down in the spring of 1945 during a raid on Koblenz. Shooter Edmund Shibble was unable to leave the car and fell to the ground from a height of about 7 kilometers. The accident ended with a spinal fracture for him. But he also remained alive, albeit bedridden.
The next event happened many years after the fighting on the battlefields died down. On December 23, 1971, a passenger airliner crashed in Peru. About half an hour after taking off from Lima, the plane got into a thunderstorm. As a result of a lightning strike, the liner caught fire and after a few moments shattered into pieces. 17-year-old passenger Juliana Kepke lost consciousness, and when she woke up, she found herself strapped to a chair and hanging from a tree. As it turned out later, she was the only survivor of the tragedy. But the way to her rescue lay through the selva, along which she wandered for 11 days, until she met the Indians who took her to the hospital. These events took place just a month before the miraculous rescue of Vesna Vulovic.
And another disaster that took place in South America, in the Chilean Andes, ended with a miraculous rescue for some passengers. On October 13, 1972, after a passenger airliner fell to the ground, 29 of the 45 people on board survived. In search of human habitation, they had to wade through the selva, engage in cannibalism. Only 72 days after the accident, 16 people were rescued.
In August 1981, in the Far East, there was a collision of an An-24 passenger aircraft and a Tu-16 bomber. Most of those on board both vehicles were killed. Only one survived - Larisa Savitskaya, who was returning on that unfortunate day with her husband from a honeymoon trip. She was found three days later in the deep taiga with serious injuries. She was treated for a long time, but to this day she is haunted by pain. And not so much physical as moral.
The world famous British aeronaut Steve Fossett also survived a fall from a height of almost 9 kilometers. The balloon, in which the traveler flew over the Coral Sea, suddenly lost its tightness, deflated and began to fall down. The speed with which he hit the water surface exceeded 70 kilometers per hour. But Fossett got off with only a slight fright. After some time, he became the first person to single-handedly travel around the world in a hot air balloon.
On October 31, 2002, his countryman Vulovich, 40-year-old Dragan Kurcic, remained alive after falling from a height of 1000 meters. He escaped with minor cut wounds, bruises and a couple of bruises. It was an ordinary jump for Kurcic. However, the main parachute did not open. The attempt to open the spare also failed. The parachutes opened simultaneously a little later, their lines were messed up.
The parachutist was saved by the fact that he fell on the roof of one of the buildings and broke it. The roof cushioned the fall. The incident did not frighten Kurcic, and just an hour after the fall, he again climbed into the sky and left the car. This time everything went well.