r/theydidthemath • u/Fizzerolli • 2d ago
[request] Assuming fresh powdery snow, how deep would it have to be for the paratrooper to survive, if possible?
My son sent me this. My immediate thought based on nothing is that it’s unsurvivable regardless of the depth.
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u/SoylentRox 1✓ 2d ago
Note the skydiver doesn't have to be going terminal velocity. Potentially the drop could be from, say, 100 feet up, right at the stall speed of the 1940s Soviet transport aircraft used. At impact with the deep snow the skydiver will be traveling at ? m/s, or ? mph
Say it's 50-60 mph, for the Lisunov Li-2, a Soviet copy of the DC-3, which has a stall speed of 51 mph. Then at impact
v = sqrt[(v_0)^2 + 2gh]
Where:
v₀ = initial speed (stall speed ≈ 27.7 m/s)
g = 9.81 m/s² (gravitational acceleration)
h = height (100 ft ≈ 30.5 m)
At impact, without drag, they will be traveling about 37 m/s or 83 mph.
I also tried a python script to model the speed vs time to take into account horizontal drag. I get
Impact results:
x: 61.19 m, y: -0.00 m
Horizontal speed: 18.97 m/s
Vertical speed: -21.59 m/s
Total speed: 28.74 m/s, which is ~64 mph
Then if the person, impacting at 64 mph, decelerates over 1m through the snow, they are subject to 42G of deceleration, which is on the edge of survivable.
About 5-10% of soldiers might survive this.
I am hoping the Soviets did experiments with dummies of the instrumented non living kind to test this before trying actual soldiers...
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u/CaptainRex8669 1d ago
The Soviets did lots of parachuting with the AN-2, which is famously impossible to stall. The POH doesn't have a stall speed listed within.
The slowest speed the aircraft has been flown at is 26 knots, and the controls remain responsive at that speed. Keep in mind, this is airspeed, not groundspeed. If they fly in a strong enough headwind they could achieve a groundspeed of 0, or even fly backwards.
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u/SoylentRox 1✓ 1d ago
Ok so with a headwind, and I take it a white knuckle pilot to get the aircraft to a 50? foot altitude, so it's essentially hovering over the ground...still would be nice to have zip lines. But yes this seems survivable.
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u/CaptainRex8669 1d ago
I have some flight training (just over 20 hours, which is half of what you need for licence here in the UK).
In slow flight, with the ground that close to you, which you can use as a visual reference point, any pilot would be able to maintain altitude without deviating more than a foot, so flying at 20 feet, or even lower, would be achievable.
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u/SpoonNZ 1d ago
Tell me more about how the ground is a good visual reference point when it’s covered in a layer of snow thick enough for a man to jump into.
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u/CaptainRex8669 1d ago
I'm from England, so I've never seen snow deeper than 2 inches. You're probably right actually.
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u/SpoonNZ 1d ago
I’m from New Zealand. The Mt Erebus disaster happened long before I was born but it’s still something that comes up surprisingly often. If you can accidentally fly straight into a mountain because there’s no visual clues, maybe flying a few feet off the ground in the same conditions isn’t a good idea.
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u/CaptainRex8669 1d ago
There's something called VMC, which stands for Visual Meteorological Conditions. And there's IMC, which stands for Instrument Meteorological Conditions.
Whether an area is VMC or IMC is determined by visibility, not wind. Flying at night, for example, is IMC. Flying in clouds is also IMC.
Any pilot can fly in VMC, but you can only fly in IMC if you and your plane are rated for IFR, which stands for Instrument Flight Rules.
The Mount Erebus Disaster happened in IFR conditions, but the scenario we are talking about here would be VFR, so there should be no danger.
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u/Laffenor 19h ago
With 2 inches of snow to cushion the fall, I would prefer to be significantly lower than 20ft.
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u/EMDReloader 18h ago
20 feet off the ground at near zero velocity?
Sounds like target practice with extra steps.
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u/ZiLBeRTRoN 1d ago
That’s wild that you only need 40 hours for a flight license.
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u/CaptainRex8669 1d ago
Technically it's 45 hours. And it's only a PPL, which stands for Private Pilots Licence. To apply for a CPL, a Commercial Pilots Licence, the minimum is 200 hours. And you need a type-rating to fly specialised planes, like jets, which requires further specialised training. These are also just the minimum, most people go above the minimum before they do their check-ride.
Wanna know what's really wild?
You can start training at age 14.
You can fly solo, without a licence, from age 16.
You can take your check-ride from age 16.5.
You can get the licence from age 17.If you pass your check-ride before you are 17, then you have to wait until you turn 17 before they actually give you the licence.
You have to be 25 to rent a car though.
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u/marxist_redneck 1d ago
Yep, it's wild. I thought it was crazy when I learned about it. I started flight training at 15 at the same time I got a driving learner's permit, and I got a PPL before I got my driver's license 😂
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u/basilect 1d ago
Same in the US as well, though a lot of people aren't ready by then (and wouldn't pass a checkride) so they won't go for it right at 40
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u/Nukethepandas 1d ago
At that point could you just land the plane on the spot? Like a vertical takeoff/landing plane but using the wind?
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u/Mercury_Madulller 1d ago
Yes. That is why smart pilots tie down their planes when storing them outside at an airport, especially when windy conditions are expected.
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u/Nukethepandas 1d ago
At that point could you just land the plane on the spot? Like a vertical takeoff/landing plane but using the wind?
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u/CaptainRex8669 1d ago
It is possible technically, but probably not a good idea. I've seen videos of un-manned aircraft taking off by themselves in a strong headwind. It's why in some countries with extreme weather, pilots tie light-aircraft to the ground.
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u/Shamino79 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you’re considering paratroopers minus the para then pilots to do this isn’t a big stretch.
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u/GearHead54 1d ago
Using a really shitty plane to balance out your shitty parachutes to make an effective airdrop sounds quite Russian, actually.
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u/Lathari 13h ago
The operating handbook does not explicitly specify a stall speed, stating instead: "If the engine quits in instrument conditions or at night, the pilot should pull the control column full aft and keep the wings level. The leading-edge slats will snap out at about 64 km/h (40 mph) and when the airplane slows to a forward speed of about 40 km/h (25 mph), the airplane will sink at about a parachute descent rate until the aircraft hits the ground."
TFW POH states the correct thing to do when engine quits is to pull on the controls and wait.
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u/Remarkable-Ask2288 2d ago
This is the Soviets we’re talking about. Of course they didn’t
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u/irvingstreet 1d ago
Dummies are even more expensive than parachute silk!
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u/thisremindsmeofbacon 1d ago
In
Soviet RussiaUSA, humans are put in plane crash and dummies are put in government40
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u/hysys_whisperer 1d ago
Dummies named Ivan were actually much cheaper than parachute silk.
Bonus points were the dummies spoke Russian.
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u/CrazyCatLady108 1d ago
considering there is no proof this ever happened, they probably didn't.
quick search brought up bunch of sites with no references and a mention of a 'myth' of a heroic squad jumping out of planes to stop a nazi tank column heading to moscow that started from a fiction book.
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u/eyesotope86 1d ago
Gotta weigh that against the knowledge that the Soviets were (are) pretty resistant to acknowledging stupid things they did...
The CIA finally had to admit they were aiming for mind control, and that took nearly 50 years to admit, so one can only imagine the Russians are tight-lipped about really, really, really stupid ideas they messed with.
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u/Spooder_guy_web 1d ago
Dawg the soviet archives are literally open, you can’t just say “the soviets were idiots and I think they’d do this, those dumb Russians”
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u/eyesotope86 1d ago
And if anyone has proven how trustworthy they can be, it's the Russians.
What do you do at the Kremlin, by the way?
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u/SteelWheel_8609 1d ago
What do you do at the CIA? Both can play that game. It’s childish.
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u/eyesotope86 1d ago
Except I used the CIA doing something stupid and keeping it hidden as an example of 'don't assume it didn't happen just because it's stupid'
So...
What's weird is the implication that I somehow called Russia more stupid, and the odd moral outrage at that.
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u/Bobzegreatest 1d ago
You're missing the point saying someone is working for russia because they disagree with you is childish
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u/Spooder_guy_web 1d ago
You’re so racist Jesus, replace Russian with my other minority but cause it’s Russian it’s all good
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u/eyesotope86 1d ago
'Russian' is a nationality, not a race, nitwit.
And their government has not been remotely trustworthy, which is clearly what was being discussed.
Do you have brain damage?
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u/DramaticLeave2563 1d ago
The CIA also attempted mind control. I wouldnt exactly call it stupid lmao. Theres simply 0 evidence for this event.
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u/eyesotope86 1d ago edited 1d ago
That was literally one of the stated goals of Project Monarch, which was a sub project under MKUltra.
LSD was originally an experiment in mind control drugs. Along the same lines as sodium pentabarbatol.
None of this is classified anymore, go read it.
Edit to add: totally misread your comment. Very high.
Only point I was making was, don't dismiss government projects and experiments just because they sound outlandish and stupid.
Russia may not be as forthcoming with their classified stuff, and doubly so with their classified stupid stuff. Lack of evidence could be due to them trying once and covering up the inevitable blunder.
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u/AutoRedialer 1d ago
Please…just stop 🙏🏼 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/S0gfkx5UEb
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u/CrazyCatLady108 1d ago
that's not how facts work. either something happened or it didn't. if it did, you gotta show some proof besides "i feel like they are the type of people to do that."
not fact checking leads us to the same place as the 'Haitians eating cats and dogs' claim. it is not a good place and all of us should fight to not wind up there.
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u/AffectionateTale3106 1d ago
To be fair, they're not saying they can prove it, they're merely saying that the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Of course, this line of reasoning can also be abused - a certain news network constantly airs people talking about the possibility that conspiracy theories might be true to make them seem more credible through pure repetition, for example. But I don't think this is particular discussion is in such bad faith
(And to be doubly fair, while absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, it could still lower the expected probability of something actually existing to near-zero without actually being zero, e.g. the Fermi paradox, which I think is more to your original comment's reasoning)
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u/CrazyCatLady108 1d ago
i agree with you, and certain things can also be very much 'on brand' but this is also the sort of reasoning that is often used in propaganda.
and lets say they did test jumping out of planes with people. the way it is phrased is "soviets do not care about people so they would 100% kill their own kind" not "they were so desperate to save their people from being exterminated by the nazis, they were willing to jump out of planes without parachutes."
US/western world has been firehozed with propaganda about soviets for decades. reddit is drowning in propaganda right now. people claim that today truth matters more than anything, and then regurgitate that same propaganda. the response to 'this is not supported by facts' should not be 'yeah, but it could be'.
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u/thisstartuplife 1d ago
I'm not even sure this story is real.
This one is.
Knew a guy in the 82nd who was testing new chutes and said they tested them once 4 out of 5 opened.
Which is why I never jumped out of a plane...though I've been pushed out of a few.
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u/Remarkable-Ask2288 1d ago
Even if it isn’t real, it sounds like something the soviets would have done, just based on reputation.
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u/Fizzerolli 2d ago
Thanks for the answer! My son (15) was really curious whether or not it would be remotely feasible. I’m guessing flying an unarmored, unarmed transport at 100ft would be suicide, so I’m going with no
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u/Xlaag 2d ago
Think about this too. Even if you had infinite loose snow to land in, and it was 100% survivable the biggest issue would be suffocation. You would basically be subjecting your soldiers to a personal self inflicted avalanche. Not even considering the broken bones it would be nearly impossible to dig yourself out of the snow.
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u/Vegetable_Log_3837 1d ago
That’s my take as skier too. Fall damage is off in deep soft powder, which is pretty rare even where it snows all the time. If the snow is that deep and soft then if your head goes under you’re dead, better luck climbing out of quicksand.
So either it’s not the epic powder day and you die from the fall, or it is and you’re stuck in a tree well.
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u/Finnegansadog 1d ago
I think you’ve got some bad info there, fellow skier. Deep and soft powder isn’t terribly rare, it’s just rare to find it in conjunction with skiable terrain.
Also, your head going under snow isn’t something immediately or even quickly deadly, especially if it’s light and soft powder. Part of a backcountry avvy course will include you getting buried in snow, so you know how to survive being buried by an avalanche. If the snow is so light and mobile that it fills in over your head like quicksand, it’s also so light that breathable air will move pretty easily around and through it.
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u/Vegetable_Log_3837 1d ago
I’m talking like 3ft+ of blower where it’s safe to huck a 20ft cliff and land on your head. Only happens a few times a year in the PNW, and Colorado often goes years without a storm that big. I’ve taken the avy course and spend a lot of time in the backcountry, snow immersion deaths are more common than avy deaths around here. On the real deep days it’s pretty easy to get stuck in your own crater, but that only happens a few times a season.
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u/CloseToMyActualName 1d ago
I'm less worried about the suffocation since I don't think the snow would be that deep outside of an avalanche or drifts in the mountains (that would be too hard to hit).
The realistic scenario would be a slow moving plane (close to 100 km/h?) within 10m of the ground over a farmer's field. Anything but a farmer's field and rocks and tree are taking folks out.
So the speed of impact is 50km/h and 100km/h horizontal. If you pad the hell out of them I think it's pretty survivable.
The trouble is that you need everything to go right for it to work in practice, plane can't be too high, can't have any tress/rocks/streams running through the field, can't have a spot with low snow cover.
And, since you're dropping behind enemy lines, you need to ensure those conditions without any scouting.
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u/Photocracy 1d ago
Paratroopers are primarily used for rapid deployment to an area that's hard to access because of terrain between the front and your bases, rather than dropping behind or on enemy lines. The armour and the armament of the transport is not important, as the biggest danger in 100 ft of snow would be a surprise mountain or something.
Keep in mind that the Russians need to be able to project military power over the Siberian wasteland, an area famous for being big, hard to traverse, and having a lot of snow. The idea is stupid but probably seemed plausible enough to test, for a Russian design group.
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u/Early_Bad8737 1d ago
If he is interested in this he should look up Vesna Vulovic. She fell more than 10km when the plane blew up and survived thanks to a mix of snow and trees.
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u/Awesome_Teo 1d ago
Real experiments of "parachuteless" landings from low altitudes were only done with dummies in a special container with ergonomic seats. And even there, a brake parachute was used to reduce horizontal speed. The project was considered unsuccessful. The rest are cool stories.
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u/Psychological_Lie656 1d ago
Why 1 meter of snow?
PS No matter from which height, due to air drag the velocity of a free falling human is around 50 m/s.
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u/justanalt67 1d ago
I feel as though deep snow would be rather like 2-3 meters than 1, which would mean it could potentially be much more survivable
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u/dbmonkey 19h ago
I think if you end up 3+ meters under the snow, you would likely die of suffocation, similar to being trapped 3 meters under an avalanche. Not sure what the most survivable depth is, but probably not super deep for that reason.
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u/DinoOnAcid 1d ago
You've left out that if the soldier has horizontal speed they won't just decelerate in 1m of vertical snow. They'd slither and "slide" before coming to a stop. The actual deceleration distance will/may be way more than 1m and could be very survivable.
I'd guess without any special knowledge itd be waaaay higher than 5-10%, if I had to make an unprofessional guess I'd say survival chance is 80-90%+ but they'd probably break something and might need serious medical attention as soon as they drop or they just don't get up and die after hours of hypothermia or inner bleeding.
Skiers do pretty high jumps, now their situation is perfect with skies and technique but a 30m drop is not insane.
As a soldier myself I can say I'd rather not do this though.
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u/Redfro33 1d ago
It's late. My fault. Wouldn't wind resistance slow your movement forward and you'd only face gravity's "terminal velocity". What if his head was heavier and it turned him into a torpedo slicing through wind resistance a bit more than a flat spinning corpse. Or perhaps his military issued uniform was too large and he turned it into a flying suit. . .
Can I ger a lil whoop whoop from my stones? Ayyyeeeee.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 1d ago
And presumably the surviving 5-10% would not be much use in the battlefield with half their skeleton shattered.
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u/Carlpanzram1916 1d ago
And presumably the surviving 5-10% would not be much use in the battlefield with half their skeleton shattered.
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u/Syncrossus 1d ago
I would assume they didn't do this in shallow snow and made initial attempts at 3m+ of snow. A significant issue at that depth becomes actually getting out of the snow.
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u/IDoStuff100 1d ago
Are you assuming constant deceleration? I would guess that deceleration in snow would be quite nonlinear as the snow under the body becomes more and more dense. The first 6" would probably barely do anything, while the last 6" would be like hitting wet concrete
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u/Jimisdegimis89 22h ago
I mean they were low on supplies and dummies take a lot of material to make, dropping real people has the upside of making your food stretch further as well.
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u/dreadpiratesmith 1d ago
I am hoping the Soviets did experiments with dummies of the instrumented non living kind to test this before trying actual soldiers...
Im sure they did. The gulag was full of dummies
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u/True-Veterinarian700 1d ago
That is an incredibly dangerous flight profile. Sitting on the edge of a stall is bad enough. Doing it at Treetop level with zero room to recover is suicide. More plausible numbers would be 70mph or whatever the approach speed is and a bit higher up.
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u/IntroductionTotal830 1d ago
I think we can all assume that 1930s soviets did not use test dummies lol
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u/Lou_Hodo 1d ago
This is the same government that failed to recalculate the mass between the dog and a human on the first manned space mission.
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u/DeadParr0t 1d ago
Russia would probably consider 90 to 95% dead on impact an acceptable loss and put it down to natural selection.
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u/7itor 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's definitely possible.
I actually landed with a cigarette rolled parachute while I was in the army stationed in alaska. Up there, we jump at around 800 feet because of the super low cloud cover.
Snow broke my fall completely. Zero injury. I managed to land between two crests, maybe 30 meters from the tree line. I was the last jumper in the chaulk.
I had to dig up out of the snow, probably 6 feet. I remember being on my back and looking up, and it reminded me of something out of looney toons where wiley Coyote gets tricked by the roadrunner and smashes into the ground, creating a silhouette.
Didn't have time to pull the reserve, but I definitely had some drag to slow me down.
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u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681 1d ago
I come from the Italian Alps, we still tell stories from the war of pilots being shot down and surviving because of the snow. I definitely believe this
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u/scalepotato 1d ago
Just to piggyback here, Nicholas Alkemade survived 18,000 ft fall with no chute in WW2; branches and deep snow saved his butt. His German captors gave him a certificate to verify his fall lol (also gratz on surviving that Wiley Coyote fall)
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u/duru93 2d ago
Idk how to do the math, but context for those who do most US airborne operations drop at 1,000 feet, but depending on clouds that can be higher or lower.
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 2d ago
With the old T10 paracutes, it would've been 800 feet in training, 500 feet for some actual combat jumps from an aircraft moving at ~140 knots. With the newer T11s, it's now 1100 feet in training and if there's been a combat jump since the new model parachute dropped then I certainly don't know about it.
Source: Was with the 82nd airborne.
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u/electrogeek8086 2d ago
How survivable is a 500 feet drop without a parachute? At first glance it doesn't seem that high.
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u/ErisGrey 2d ago
I survived. At the time of my accident, I was one of 8 people.
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u/LegendofLove 2d ago
jesus fuck that's a lot of injuries. I'm amazed you managed to survive through all of that ignoring the actual smashing into the Earth. Not being able to sleep, being on 650 meds and all those injuries must be hell. Has any of it gotten better since that post?
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u/ErisGrey 2d ago edited 2d ago
It was better, than got worse after covid hit me. For about a week, it really felt like I had just hit again. I'm back on all the medications I was in the begining, plus a few more due to complications post covid. It significanly flared, and added a couple more auto-immune issues caused by the long term inflammation. I was on Chemo to rein in the immune system, but my pancreas and liver started to fail. A lot of treatments are paused while waiting for my pancreas and liver to heal, so we're having to do more non-invasive treatments at the moment.
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u/LegendofLove 1d ago
I'm really sorry to hear all this. I hope you can recover some and have the slightest semblance of health for whatever remains of life
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u/thexvillain 2d ago
I have a friend whose parachute didn’t deploy on his final training jump. He survived with similar injuries. I would have thought you were him, but his happened in 2009.
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u/ErisGrey 1d ago
Was it at Bragg too? I know a congressional inquiry got opened up eventually. I heard there were other accidents, but no detail on how bad they were.
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u/JoshuaFalken1 2d ago
Holy fuck.
How you doing now?
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u/ErisGrey 2d ago
Day to day still. Back on far more medications than I want to be, but moved to a place that is far more beautiful than where I used to live. My drive to my specialists is only 20 minutes now instead of 2+ hours.
They've scheduled annual ablations on the spine and neck for me. The next one is in June, we are doing 5 levels bilateral.
In between the ablations, I get trigger points when needed. We'll usually do about 50 injections per session, with 3 sessions. Right side, then left side, then neck. (EG right side of back right next to spine and going out towards the side) We try to do more, but I actually start to heave/vomit after too many.
I was told my heart is no longer a concern. But my pancreas and liver started failing in September of last year. So I'm still on weekly/bi-weekly blood monitoring.
Covid hit me really hard. I wasn't even sick, when one day I collapsed in the kitchen. The Chronic Inflammation with covid was not a good combination. I got rhabdomyosis again, and lost all my muscle mass again. The nerve issues got flared up even more. My Nerve Conduction Study showed 32% absent response. They officially added both MS and Fibromyalgia to my medical issues.
I never forgot that they said I'll be lucky to make it to 40. So a few years ago my 40th birthday was extra special for me. Took the whole family down to Universal Studios (Hollywood, California).
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 1d ago
Shit dude. I definitely thought I might know you for a minute but the guy I know had his incident happen in ‘14 or ‘15. Also I don’t think he was nearly as badly injured and his was an incident of someone with a partial malfunction landing in his chute as they were coming down.
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u/AliBinGaba 2d ago
500’ or 85’ doesn’t matter. You hit terminal velocity.
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u/merlin469 2d ago
85' is fatal in most cases, but not quite terminal velocity. Takes a couple hundred feed or about 2-3 seconds.
Source: Have jumped out of perfectly good airplanes.
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u/AliBinGaba 1d ago
I was 101…I can’t say planes.
That was kinda my point. I just smoked a bit before I typed it. But they get the point. I fell 60’ and I’m going through pt right now from fusions.
Life’s a bitch. Don’t get old.
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u/SoylentRox 1✓ 1d ago
He hit terminal velocity with whatever drag a collapsed chute provides. So it's still slower than it would be jumping with no chute, that's why he's still alive (and the other soldiers, seems like it's been at least 3, who experienced the same type of failure are alive as well).
Not to discount it, many people have died with collapsed parachutes. I remember a WW2 airman supposedly survived falling into deep snow with no chute but he may have had a collapsed chute as well.
There's also a flight attendant who survived an aircraft breakup, but she was shielded by the wreckage. Similar story - the wreckage lowered the terminal velocity. Everyone else on the aircraft died. A WW2 tail gunner survived a similar way.
So yeah, pure naked falls to dirt or water I think are currently at 100 percent fatality rate.
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u/RelativeChest6657 1d ago
A WW2 pilot survived a naked 22,000ft drop by landing on a glass roof. He had to of been the luckiest person alive at that moment!
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u/SoylentRox 1✓ 1d ago
I would assume his torn parachute was still on him and interacting with the air stream. Glass doesn't seem likely to provide the gradual deceleration needed. (There's no parachute stunt landings with wing suits hitting a special net or boxes decelerator)
It's possible the impact with the roof tore it loose so when the German soldiers on the ground found him there was no chute.
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u/DonaIdTrurnp 2d ago
On the order of three survivors out of everyone who has done it.
None of them would be in position to be combat-effective.
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 2d ago
Doing some quick maths, it looks like if you were stationary and jumped from 500 feet, you'd be moving at about 120 mph when you hit the ground. So you're probably not surviving that. Add to if 140 knots is around 161 mph moving laterally, I think you'd be moving a bit faster when you impacted.
Even with partial parachute malfunctions - where it's deployed but it's not catching all the air that it should - I've known plenty of people who broke legs, andkles, shoulders, got concussions, etc.
One of the big reasons they raised the height we jumped from for the T11 parachutes was that they take considerably longer to fully deploy (it's been a minute since I had to deal with any of this. But I believe the T10 was 25 lbs of fabric while the T11 was 45. So... a lot more fabric) so if anything went wrong and there was any sort of delay in the thing fully catching air then you were likely going to burn in before your could react. Looking at this online freefall calculator, it looks like it should take a little over 7 seconds to hit the ground in freefall from 800ft and the opening shock time (the time where the parachute has fully deployed, caught air, and you start rapidly shedding velocity) was supposed to be 6 seconds under ideal conditions for the T11 so I'm surprised they thought 800 feet in training was a good idea in the first place.
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u/True-Veterinarian700 1d ago
There have been multiple cases of people surviving falls of multiple tens of thousands of feet. Some people have also died of falls of as few as 6 feet.
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u/ConcaveNips 1d ago
I don't know what airborne operations you were dropping on, but damn near all of mine were 600 feet. A couple at 800. The ones in airborne school were all at the max height, 1500 ft, but that's it. Minimum height nearly every jump.
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u/HAL9001-96 1d ago
yeah at that point you die the moment you hit snow even if its light powder snow and infiniteyl deep
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u/Karma1913 1d ago
Soviet airborne concepts from that era were crude. The nazis and the failed airborne invasion of Crete were very similar to the soviet state of the art but better resourced: Nazis observed soviet airborne development and as a result moved along the same lines. They both had a very similar shitty parachute harness design with a single connection to the parachute instead of two as we did/do. They also deployed by sliding off the wings of bombers.
Anyways, both choices meant dudes couldn't carry shit, like not even a rifle in early trials and operations (including Crete) so they relied on drops of weapons and ammo that preceded the soldiers.
Basically every soviet and nazi airborne concept started with dudes doing some barn stormer shit, face planting somewhere, and then looking for a loot box. That was as good as it got.
The soviets realized this was a bad idea worth pursuing but got distracted by a worse idea: invading Finland. The nazis thought it was a great idea until a bunch of fellas in Crete got to the loot boxes first and the fallschimjaeger had such a bad time there were no more nazi airborne operations.
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u/Mathi_boy04 2d ago
I think even if the snow is deep and light enough to cushion the impact, you will go so deep into the snow you won't be able to get yourself out of it and will "drown" like people stuck in avalanches.
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u/Fizzerolli 2d ago
Oh for sure, I meant die on impact.
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u/quad_up 1d ago
Depends on the slope. Back in like 2005-2010 skiers were regularly hitting 100ft+ cliffs, “taking a hip” and skiing away. Essentially you land on your back or side and bounce back on your skis and ski away.
The record was something like 240ft, but I remember reading it was insignificant because someone fell out of a plane from like 25k, landed on the right kind of slope and walked away.
Them were some wild times back then. People still huck, but not like they used to.
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u/Putrid-Chemical3438 1d ago
The plane they used was the Tupolev TB-1 which had a max speed of...drumroll 111 mph.
It would fly at barely over tree top level slightly faster than a car and drop dudes into 8 feet of snow. It was very survivable. Not very practical though.
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u/HAL9001-96 1d ago
that would work but I'd be kinda worreid about being buried in snow afterwards like how do they breathe once they reach the bottom of those 8 feet of low density snow?
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u/twillie96 1d ago
There's an entry hole
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u/HAL9001-96 1d ago
so you just stay where you are and hope i t doesn't collapse?
we're talking about very soft powdered snow, anything stronger and you die on impact already
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u/twillie96 1d ago
It's soft powdered, you'll just dig your way up.
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u/HAL9001-96 1d ago
up through what?
it will be like climbing air
getting it out of the way or moving it isn't the problem
trying to stand on it will be
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u/AutoRedialer 1d ago
Utterly shocking that people here never paused to think about whether this was true. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/S0gfkx5UEb
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u/KarlosMacronius 1d ago
That's the problem with society today. It's depressing, like we're headed into a new dark age.
Having said that, this group us just here for the number crunching, true or not doesn't matter to these guys so long as it's a fun or interesting problem.
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u/AutoRedialer 1d ago
That’s why I didn’t single out OP. Seemed like they were genuinely concerned primarily with the physics lol. But man do i roll my eyes at how Cold War propaganda has such a long half-life
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u/NoMansSkyWasAlright 2d ago
It sounds like they had been considering doing it and might've run some small-scale trials. But most of the stories surrounding this phenomenon are thought to be urban myths. While they did have a lack of parachutes, they also had a lack of aircraft and experienced pilots which made airborne operations at scale pre-cold-war incredibly difficult for them.
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u/Deathbyfarting 1d ago
According to Google:
Terminal velocity of human (male) = 120mph. Death above 30g but mythbusters easily show this is highly dependent on where this force occurs. (Easy source)
You'd require 100ft of deceleration to hit just over 30g's of acceleration for the duration. So you'd need something like 150ft feet of pounder, not packed, snow to have a comfortable chance to survive.
Not unreasonable if you fall at an angle into a mountain side and "skim" down the top layer...but dam that's incredibly lucky. Remember it's the sudden stop that takes less than a second which imparts the most g-force to the object. You can survive any speed, just as long as the stop isn't within a fraction of a second.
120mph to 0mph in 1in is 58,000g that's the deadly part.
Edit: hypothetical possible...but other aspects would be tricky to ....and I'm not gonna guess if the snow is deep enough....
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u/Far_Tap_488 1d ago
Terminal velocity requires 1500 ft which para troopers are going to jump lower than that.
A really low jump would be feasible. 255 ft in 2006 https://youtu.be/-RYkapHBVs8
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u/Deathbyfarting 1d ago
That would be (ruffly)
80mph reached, with a stop distance of 10ft you'd experience 22g's of acceleration. Much more do-able.....not that I'd be volunteering either way, but still. That'd be the scariest 4 seconds of anyone's life.
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u/prototypist 1d ago
Though the text in the screenshot looks like it is from Wikipedia, I can't find that in a current article. It's been included with this image for over 5 years
People asked roughly the same question on the AskHistorians subreddit in 2016 and a forum in 2003 so the legend has been around for a long time. I think you would find more legit sources by now if it could be supported.
To answer the math of the question, I'd look at how high and fast people can survive a jump into water. The plane would need to be flying low and slow to get the drop under 170 feet and speed of impact below 60mph https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_diving .
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u/marxist_redneck 1d ago
Wikipedia has a list of highest falls people have survived without a parachute . There's a handful of WWII era ones there that fell in deep snow!
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u/ThisAppIsAss 1d ago
Many years ago, My highschool math teacher made us solve this for the amount of snow needed to survive let’s say 6 G’s. But I remember getting a negative amount of snow.
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u/El_mochilero 1d ago
If the snow were deep and powery enough to take that fall - wouldn’t you just have a whole bunch of soldiers wearing heavy gear stuck in super deep snow that they can’t get out of?
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u/Bla_aze 2d ago
It's a very difficult question to answer purely with math's, as both snow behavior and human survival at different forces is quite complex and doesn't lend itself well to back of the napkin calculations.
So your best bet for an actual answer is to look at historical reports, and you'll find that you can survive terminal velocity with enough luck. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling_(accident)#Surviving_falls
Now for an attempt at maths: Terminal velocity of a human falling flat is often said to be around 55m/s I'm gonna assume there's too many variables describing snow behavior to be calculated by me, and will instead assume that we're lucky enough to land in magical snow that gives us our best shot at survival by slowing us down with a constant acceleration (that's also an assumption, maybe a more complex deceleration pattern would be preferable but what do I know?)
We can compute the time the deceleration would be sustained for to check which g force would be applicable, by just dividing the speed difference by the acceleration, here 30gs (55-0)/(309.8) gives around 0.2 seconds, which according to the nifty Wikipedia chart is the max a human can sustain for that amount of time in an optimal position. Then, we can use the equation from kinematics with constant acceleration a = (552-0*2)/(2d) for the deceleration a felt by a human going from 55 to 0 in a distance d. We get that 30gs is about 6 meters of constant deceleration.
So my final guess is 6 meters, which is likely an overestimate, but is definitely in the right order of magnitude so I'm happy with myself.
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u/Cthulwutang 1d ago
This is like the story of the Gurkhas who volunteered to jump out of airplanes but asked the pilot to fly low and slow over muddy ground. When the pilot told them that parachutes wouldn’t open if it was too low, the Gurkhas said, “Oh! Nobody told us there’d be parachutes!”
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u/MarMacPL 1d ago
Iirc in 1935 or 1936 soviets made biggest military excercises around Kiev and they were paradropping more paratroopers then any other country had. They have tanks, artillery that could be dropped or transported by airplanes.
According to wikipedia there was 5 airborne corps (division size) pre German invasion and 10 after (until summer of 1942). Each corps had more then 8000 man.
So personally I don't think they had to experiment with some jumps without parachute.
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u/TheTardisTravelr 1d ago
I've know two soldiers who survived their chutes not deploying properly. The first guy had a partial chute open so it slowed him enough to just really, really hurt. The second guy hit the ground, and bounced. Injured his spine real good. Few years of physical therapy, and a love of the infantry and he's jumping again.
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u/ournamesdontmeanshit 1d ago
Good spinal injures are very rare. Most injures of that type are very bad.
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u/JemmaMimic 1d ago
Laurie Anderson has a creepy song about Finnish farmers and those deep snow experiments.
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u/Fonzy25 1d ago
The falling paratrooper is actually a problem high school kids solve in their AP Physics class. The textbook is by Halliday, Resnik, and Walker and the problem is #24 of chapter 9. The initial speed of the paratrooper is 56 m/s and it uses work-energy theorem to solve for how much work the snow must do to stop him. It’s about 1.08m based on his weight of 85kg. It then has you calculate the impulse required. It’s a fun one and the kids don’t believe it but it’s physics at its finest!
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u/BarnacleEddy 2d ago
When you fall from 1,000 feet (~305 meters), you hit speeds around 77 m/s (~173 mph), which is even faster than human terminal velocity because the fall isn’t long enough to level out. At that speed, you need something to slow you down gradually enough to avoid turning into a pancake.
We can estimate how much stopping distance (snow depth) you’d need to decelerate from that speed at a rate that a human might survive. Assuming a max survivable deceleration of ~40 Gs (40 Gs x 9.81m/s2) = 392 m/s2 (for a few milliseconds), you’d need:
d = (v2)/(2a) = (772)/(2 x 392) = approx 7.6meters
So: ~25 feet of very light, fluffy snow.
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u/SolarApricot-Wsmith 2d ago
Wouldn’t you probably suffocate/drown in 20 ft of snow?
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u/scotchtapeman357 1d ago
Not drown, but you sure aren't going anywhere fast if you're not 20+' into snow. You might eventually suffocate or die of exposure if you can't get out
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u/HAL9001-96 1d ago
powder snow is actually less dense than water but at terminal velocity the impact would still kill you atr the snows surface regardless of how deep it is
if dropped from very low altitude from a very slow flying plane you might have a chacne though if the snow is abour 4 meters deep or so
though at that point you'd be buried under snow afterwards
and that is assuming its light powder snow, if oyu misjudge fro mabove and the snow is denser you jsut die on impact anyways
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u/Normal-Selection1537 1d ago
In 1930 most planes were very slow moving compared to today.
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u/HAL9001-96 1d ago
there's still soem slow moving planes today but there's a limit to how low and slow you can safely fly over
even then you'd need insanely thick snow and if you misjudge its state yo udie
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