After plane or space craft crashes, what happens to the bodies? Do they implode because of the pressure? In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies.
After the challenger explosion there weren’t any bodies either.
What happens to them?
Eta: Thank you so, so much everyone who has responded to me with helpful comments and answers, I am very grateful y’all have helped me to understand.
Eta2: Don’t get nasty, this is a safe and positive space where kindness is always free.
I am under the impression of “no bodies”, because:
A. They never go into detail about bodies (yes it’s morbid, but it’s also an unanswered question….hence why I’m here) on the news/documentaries, only about the vehicle and crash site information.
B. I do not understand force and the fragility of the human body on that scale, —which is funny because I have been in a life altering car accident so I do have *some* understanding of how damaging very high speeds in heavy machinery can be. You’re crushed like bugs, basically. Just needed some eli5 to confirm it with more dangerous transport options.
Nonetheless, I have learned a great deal from you all, thank you💙
Eta3: I am learning now some of my framing doesn’t make sense, but y’all explained to me what and why. And everyone is so nice, I’m so thankful🥹
In: Physics
With aviation/spactcraft incidents there’s often a combination of a huge amount of fuel burning in a short amount of time or substantial impacts.
Human bodies aren’t very well suited to extreme heat or being crushed/impaled by rigid materials with a great amount of force.
humans are very squishy and skin can be broken by the flimsiest piece of paper, so getting smushed into the planet at 500 MPH ain’t gonna be easy on said squishy body
Crashing into the ground at hundreds of miles per hour tends to pulverize things. Add to that hundreds if not thousands of gallons of jet fuel and there’s not going to be anything but high melting point metal left when it’s all said and done.
For space craft, they’re going so fast that if something goes wrong, they just rip themselves and everything inside them apart while the rocket fuel explodes and turns anything that might remain into essentially nothing.
The astronauts aboard Shuttle Columbia were torn apart. There’s no easy way to say this.
By collecting various body parts and using DNA genotyping, they were able to tell what body part belonged to which astronaut.
It’s reported that a 3-year old boy found one of the female astronaut’s leg in his front yard. One astronaut’s heart was found, by itself, without any other body parts nearby.
The aerodynamic forces going Mach 18–25 are such that the human body cannot hold itself together.
In the case of Challenger they recovered the bodies out of the crew cabin. It took a while because it was on the bottom of the ocean.
They were also able to find the remains of all the Columbia astronauts in east Texas.
It took a while, and most of the bodies were not intact. There are other descriptions about why so I’ll leave that.
RIP to those that lost their lives in the pursuit of science
I can assure you that there were bodies in every case, the question is more about how intact and/or recognisable they were.
No, impact-forces and jet-fuel are *not* going to completely turn a person to dust. At the very worst you can expect a charred partial skeleton wrapped in the remains of their clothing.
Keep in mind that Cremation funerals typically have to deliberately grind the bones down into the ash in order to finish the process because Bone doesn’t break up very much from being burned.
There will always be bodies, whether you can recognise who they were is another matter.
Yes, even Challenger had bodies, here’s an excerpt from the wikipedia page:
>The crew compartment, human remains, and many other fragments from the shuttle were recovered from the ocean floor after a three-month search-and-recovery operation.
In practice it’s also worth adding that plenty of people have survived plane-crashes, even quite large ones. Planes are built to help their passengers survive some pretty bad situations, though yes, full-tilt at 500mph into a mountainside is pretty unsurvivable.
Unpowered gliding to a soft-landing in a field with the gear-up is a designed-for scenario for example.
Losing a wing, breaking up and tumbling to the ground is pretty certain to kill everyone onboard.
Stay strapped in unless you have to get up for the bathroom and you’ll have much better odds of survival in event of a crash-landing.
We are able to recover most of the bodies from these crashes where we are able to locate the crash site. Depending on the crash we might find more body parts then complete bodies but do our best at pairing the body parts together. There are teams who specialise in this using DNA, clothing, size and weight, etc. to identify each body and body part. A lot of these bodies are sent to autopsy, both to help identify them but also to find out what wounds they have which might help investigators. For example if they suffocated before the crash or if they got any wounds soon before the crash instead of after.
We have recovered the bodies of everyone who have died in spacecrafts. For the Challenger disaster it took three months to locate the crew compartment and over a month to recover all the bodies. They were all autopsied but they were too badly damaged to determine a cause of death although there were some evidence. One important question was if the crew could have survived if there were better systems for egress and what we could do to make the next launches safer. The leading theory is that at least some of the crew survived the initial explosion but became unconscious from the lack of oxygen at that altitude. This caused a change in procedures where the crew would wear full pressure suits with integrated oxygen supplies so that if the spacecraft failed they would have the ability to bail out in a parachute either through a provided escape hatch in the floor or through any openings in the bulkhead caused by the explosion.
For Space Shuttle Columbia it took ten days to recover all the bodies as they were spread over a larger area but on land. The autopsies showed that the pressure suit they wore were not able to protect them from the violent trauma from the orbiter breaking up.
One reason you might think there were no bodies is that any footage published from these types of events takes care to not show the bodies. Either carefully framing the shot to not show any bodies or to blur or block out the bodies from the image. You might for example notice that footage from accident sites rarely show the ground as this is often covered in bodies, body parts and blood. And if they show the ground it is usually just a tiny area with a bit of debris that happened to not have any bodies in it. This is out of respect for the dead but also to protect unsuspecting viewers from horrible scenes.
Put a hamburger into a tin can. Strap on a big tank of gasoline. Launch the can into the side of a cliff at a hundred mph, then throw a grenade at it.
How much of the hamburger do you think you’ll be able to recover?
Intact bodies are often found from plane crashes in which there is an attempted emergency landing, or the speed of the aircraft is lower such as during a failed landing. In these situations the fuselage will break into sections and individuals may be sucked out of the now broken aircraft. These crashes will create a trail of debris and bodies that allow air crash investigators to track the timeline of the aircraft’s breakup. This is also why emergency services such as ambulances will arrive at plane crashes. It is not uncommon for individuals sucked out of aircraft to survive the initial crash, but be found in critical condition.
However, most plane crashes are higher speed and will cause a near complete disintegration of the aircraft and it’s passengers. There will typically be remains recovered, but they will be quite small.
Picture driving down the highway in your car. You hit a bug and it goes SPLAT on your windshield. Now imagine that the bug is a human, the windshield is the ground, and instead of 60 mph, you’re hitting at 500 mph. Also everything is on fire.
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