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?
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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
All of the bodies were found in the wreckage of the Challenger. The crew compartment separated from the rest of the shuttle in one piece, and all of the crew members were found still strapped into their seats.
I’ve never heard of any incident where clothing was found, but no bodies (or parts of bodies, which sometimes is all that is left). Were you thinking of a specific incident?
In plane crashes, there were actually bodies found. Be “creative” with google-search in looking for MH17 aftermath photos.
We, uh, absolutely found bodies after the Challenger disaster. The crew cabin was intact all the way to impact with the water.
Well the details of the incident in question would affect the answer here.
in watercraft accidents, for example, passengers may have abandoned the craft and drowned miles from where the wreckage lands…so the discovery of the wreckage doesn’t result in the recovery of their bodies. the watercraft may just be in too deep of water to recover it to begin with. Our outside of the area in which they are searching for it. also, the bodies might have been moved by sea life/decomposed/consumed before the wreckage is found. In plane crashes, the bodies may have been sucked out of the aircraft in a hull breach situation and landed miles from the wreckage and either the bodies or perhaps even the plane itself might land somewhere so remote or off-course that the wreckage cannot be found in the search area. (think how long it took those rugby players that crash landed in the andes mountains to be found. had they died in the crash, that wreckage may have never been discovered.) In terms of spacecraft, were they outside of our atmosphere? Too far to be pulled by the earth’s gravity? Incinerated upon reentry? or still out in space floating amongst the debris? There are lots of different scenarios that might result in bodies being unrecoverable after an exhaustive search. It doesn’t mean the bodies disappeared…just that we couldn’t find them or lacked the means of retrieving them.
Bodies are often found, they’re often just not show on TV. I saw the raw photos from MH17 — I work in news gathering — there were lots of bodies. People still in seats. Babies crushed on the floor.
It really depends. The bodies that can be recovered are recovered. But in some cases they’ve been destroyed to such a degree that identifying them is next to impossible. If an airplane crashes and catches on fire and you go to the site and see a blackened mass just splattered everywhere you can’t know if you’re looking a burned remains or burned materials from the aircraft. It’s not true that there are never bodies though. Some people are found in various states and others are in a state that’s more or less impossible to identify. A particularly harrowing story that comes to mind is when a train in the london underground crashed into a dead end tunnel full speed. A lot of the people in the forward carriages were crushed into a pulp.
In other cases it’s a question of difficulty. If a ship sinks recovering the bodies can be very hard or impossible. Same for other disasters and accidents like earthquakes, floods, people trapped in caves or up mountains or in the wilderness. The number one rule of search and rescue and body recovery is to not risk the lives of the rescuers, as in you can’t lose more people trying to save or recover others. In those cases if it’s deemed too dangerous or difficult to recover they’ll just give up. It sounds very cruel but it is the right thing to do. Accidents are tragic but losing more people afterwards doesn’t make it better in any way, only worse.
In many cases they are able to recover bodies, or at least remains. It depends on the forces involved in the accident and where they happen. The challenger is an extreme example. It was a massive explosion with extreme fuel loads in a craft traveling thousands of miles an hour and at a very high altitude. An explosion of that scale would pretty much reduce the bodies to unrecognizable pieces that would’ve then been scattered across miles because of how high they were.
Most of the time they are able to recover the bodies from plane crashes. The state the bodies are in depends on the details of the crash. The times they aren’t recovered is usually because they crashed in the middle of the ocean and they would’ve quickly drifted apart and biodegrades or been eaten by the time they would’ve been located.
>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.
Oh, there are bodies. It’s just that the news media don’t want to be posting pictures of dismembered passenger body parts all over people’s television screens, especially during the dinner hour, and even moreso because some parent might find out about the crash by seeing the top third of daughter’s corpse lying in the wreckage with her intestines spilling out and blood everywhere.
Trust me. Unless you get there after the sharks, or the crabs, or the vultures, or whatever scavengers happen to be in the area, bodies or body parts will be found.
Here’s a very NSFW video that will shed some light on it. The short version is that with sufficient energy, humans will simply splatter like throwing an egg on the wall. It’s all there, but it would be more accurate to describe the remains as “biologic material” rather than “bodies”.
Not all crashes are that energetic and so they will indeed find lots of bodies. In fact they usually find more bodies than the number of missing.
Watch the recent Lockerbie documentary. Several stories of people landing in fields and gardens still strapped into their seats. I think there was one where a body was found sitting on someone’s roof.
Obviously lots of other people were totally annihilated in the fireball, but if they separated from the fuselage high-up, they just ‘floated’ down to earth at terminal velocity.
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