If my parachute fails to open, why should I aim for land rather than water?

Question

I was watching these 'what if' parachute failure videos on YouTube and everywhere they say do not choose water over land. Why should we not choose water and what happens if we land in water?

One such video:

Answer 1

If your parachute fails to open entirely you are almost certainly extremely dead no matter where you land, however occasionally people do survive. A partial failure of a chute is much more survivable. You will be coming down much faster than you would with a good chute, and you are going to get injured, probably badly. Think broken legs and arms with neck or back trauma. You may sustain a concussion as well, and you will certainly go into shock.

If you come down in the water you will be injured and unable to keep yourself afloat, and it will be much harder to rescue you. On land help will be much closer and, and as @RonBeyer says in comments, you can't drown on land.

Land has features which may help you survive: trees, vegetation, hay bales, crops, snow, and many other things may cushion your impact enough to make the difference between life and death. Water is the same wherever you go, and doesn't have nearly enough give to cushion an impact.

Answer 2

From a jump instructor, whose chute failed:

You landed in a blackberry bush, right? Yeah, it was less than a meter high and it wasn't super dense but it was better than hitting than the hard floor or hitting the lake. If I'd landed in the water I would have been knocked out just the same and broken the exact same bones. But my lungs would have collapsed and I would have drowned, because I was unconscious.

So this instructor had studied the problem enough to know that he didn't want to land in the water. He is not alone.

• How to fall 15,000 feet, hit the ground, and survive (2016)

Also, years ago, I remember meeting a woman who was in the Army, doing a jump in North Carolina, and her chutes failed to open. She targeted a pile of hay, and survived.

The terminal velocity of the human body is about 120 MPH, and may be less if the jumper can increase their drag. Picking the right landing spot, such as soft vegetation, appears to increase survivability. Landing in water seems to cause complications with breathing and also with the ability to swim if limbs are broken or consciousness is lost.

A co-worker was a base commander when a F-4 went down and the pilot's chute failed to deploy in the North Sea at night. The pilot survived, and his injuries were limited to compressed discs and hypothermia. It took them about 70 minutes to fish out the pilot.

I do not know what the statistics are for water landings vs land landings, but it is generally recognized that a land touchdown provides more opportunity to steer to favorable soft targets.

Addendum: This fall (2020), I met an Army ranger who had a chute and backup fail on a jump. He targeted a pine tree, and tried to hit close to the trunk at the top. He was scratched up and bruised, but walked out. His situation happened 5 years ago in Northern Michigan. He has given several talks on it, but I have not located any video's.

Answer 3

An impact on land has a small chance of survival, an impact on unbroken water has none.

Falling from thousands of feet without a parachute is very likely a death sentence, but there are a handful of cases in which people have survived. In nearly all of them, it is because the person landed in particularly hospitable terrain, like hitting a number of branches on the way down to slow their fall, or rolling down a steep hill.

All of these stories have one thing in common: slowly breaking your fall

What kills you isn't really the impact, it's the deceleration of the impact. You could be slowly lowered from 10,000 feet by a crane and you'd be just fine. But when you fall from great height, you build up a lot of speed as energy that has to be dissipated upon impact, and if it can't be dissipated into your environment it gets dissipated into you.

Your body can absorb reasonable impacts from reasonable heights, but it has limits. When you slowly break your fall, you're essentially splitting one unsurvivable impact into many smaller survivable ones.

What does this all have to do with land versus water?

Land has terrain. Water doesn't. If you hit the side of a grassy hill and roll down hundreds of feet before finally stopping, you've dissipated all this energy into the hill, while splitting up all the impact on your body.

If you hit the water, it really doesn't matter whether it's hot water, cold water, saltwater, freshwater, mineral water, branded water. It's going to be a very, very hard impact, and it's going to be head-on, because water is always level to gravity, so no hills or angles to dissipate energy. Water's very high surface tension means that at speed, the surface of water behaves much like the surface of a brick.

In Short:

Avoid water if you're falling without a parachute. Aim for trees. Or hills. Or peat bogs. Or giant trampolines. Or something that isn't flat and uniform like water.

Answer 4

At a freefall speed of 120MPH, water would provide a drag of about 1000 Gs which would be the same as hitting the ground and stopping in 6 inches (15cm). Better than concrete but still not survivable.

Answer 5

At 200 km/ h, 120 mph, the top speed a human body can reach in free fall, water surface could be as hard as a brick wall. I wonder if there's any difference in reaching the water in vertical or horizontal, or if sending something before you to break the surface will reduce the impact. I've read about two men during WW II who survived a fall from thousands of feet without a parachute, one fell into the high slope of an snowy mountain, he had almost every bone broken, but the soviets who recovered him were so amazed of his survival, that cared of him until full recovery. Another was falling, when suddenly he felt something at his reach, and hold it with his arms, it were the legs of another airman who was parachuted; even with the higher speed of two in a single parachute, the damned man survived after releasing the saving legs a bit above ground.

Old Spanish joke is about someone falling without a parachute: as aproaching ground, counts the distance left: 1 km, 500 m, 100 m, when at 50 cm over ground, comments: 'This is a small step, I'll jump donw from it without danger' Aufwiedersehen. Blessings +

Answer 6

If you see a large water body around you, direct yourself to that.

Carry something which can cause a large concussive force just as you're about to impact. Say you're about to hit the water, you lob in object X which causes a large boom. The concussive force of the blast pushes you back and cushions you using the water as a "sofa" of sorts. You have to time this perfectly though, too soon and you miss it, too late and you get caught in it yourself. You can always try practicing by jumping from a low enough bridge into the water and trying, have enough health insurance and you'll be fine.