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
When a large vehicle crashes at a high speed, there are usually only body parts or fragments left. The energy resulting from an explosion or crash has to go *somewhere*. The majority of it is turned into heat and light in an explosion, and that heat makes the air expand very fast. The human body can’t withstand the speed the air is moving at, and gets torn apart, sometimes into very, very small pieces.
If a plane crashes, it’s a similar, but different thing: The energy from the collision has to go somewhere. Some of it goes into the plane’s structure, and some of that gets transferred to the people on board. But there’s also a second thing working against the passengers, called inertia, which is another kind of energy. The inertia keeps them moving forward, but the seatbelt is holding them down. The body wants to keep going, but it’s being held in place by the seatbelt and parts of it begins to stretch and tear, because it can only hold together under certain levels of stress. They then detach from the main body and fly around the cabin.
Those parts that become disconnected and fly around in the airplane hit hard objects, and break up into even smaller bits. Sometimes the bits can be as small as a cubic centimeter, and can be very hard to find.
There’s an agency called ‘Interpol’ that sets standards on how big a piece of a body has to be before it’s collected and identified. They have decided that if it’s less than 1 cubic centimeter, it shouldn’t be collected. So if you have a crash with a huge amount of energy, where all of the people on board were broken into bits smaller than one cubic centimeter, there would be organic matter at the crash site… but no ‘bodies’.
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