Is it possible to skydive into the ocean

You know it's going to be a bad day when you find yourself falling through the air without a parachute! But let's say that, somehow, you were to fall out of an airplane and found yourself in that exact situation. You have to keep that you have to think fast. If you fall out at 12, feet about 2 miles up , you only have about 60 seconds before you hit the ground.

In free fall, you fall at about miles per hour mph if you have your arms and legs extended, and at that speed you will travel about 12, feet in one minute.

The first thing to do is to look for a body of water. If you can dive into water, it won't feel good at mph, but you'll survive if the water is deep enough -- at least 12 feet or so. Steer toward the water it's helpful if you've been skydiving before and know how to steer as you are falling , and dive right in. If there's no water around, then you need to try something else. One person in World War II survived a jump without a parachute from about 18, feet.

He fell through the branches in a pine thicket and landed in deep snow. So you might try looking for some trees and hope for the best. Lacking water or trees -- for example, you're falling in an urban area and can't spot a rooftop pool -- your next option is to look for something big with the hope that it will break your fall.

For example, landing on the roof of an RV, a mobile home or a truck's trailer is a possibility. These structures are not extremely strong.

When you hit them, they'll break and absorb some of the energy of the fall. Whether it will be enough energy or not is an open question. There's only one way to find out, but we don't recommend you try it! And while we do like to do our own research and take things apart here at HowStuffWorks, you have to draw the line somewhere. This is definitely a line. Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close.

Mobile Newsletter chat dots. 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. 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. 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 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 , 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. 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, 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. 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.

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. At a freefall speed of MPH, water would provide a drag of about Gs which would be the same as hitting the ground and stopping in 6 inches 15cm. Better than concrete but still not survivable. 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, m, m, when at 50 cm over ground, comments: 'This is a small step, I'll jump donw from it without danger' Aufwiedersehen.

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.

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