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
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.
Latest Answers