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
Body parts are recovered always. It’s just not an easy subject nor one that people want to hear about so those parts of the news never make it past the editors. As someone who has seen dismembered human remains in motorcycle accidents I can assure it changes your life for the worse. There are images I will never be able to remove from my mind: literal meat crayon marks, severed head, severed hand, intestines, liver, open thoraxes….its just fucking horrible and I don’t know how medics, paramedics, firemen, police are able to do what they do. It happened once that I saw it happen and saw the aftermath and I was scarred for life (and I was already 28 at the time).
So yeah, body parts are always recovered but there is no reason to make it known out of respect.
When the Lockerbie plane broke up there were bodies just lying in fields and peoples gardens – those were the ones that got pulled out the plane as it disintegrated.
The people still strapped into the centre (engine) section were essentially vaporised when that hit (as were the occupants of the houses it directly landed on) because that was full of fuel and moving fast.
I used to do recovery after military crashes. A transport tumbled into the desert floor nearby during a low level practice. In this case, there were a lot of small parts left over along with a few large recognizable chunks. And lots of feet in shoes/boots because the footwear protected the feet. If you get to the crash site quickly you can recover most of the parts for identification and return to the family. If it takes time to find and travel to the site, you’re in competition with the animals and environment. Skeletons have been found in recovered WWII aircraft. <edited for grammar>
Returning from orbit, spacecrafts and the bodies inside are traveling over 17,000 mph.
The air that slows them down also heats up the craft. If the craft breaks apart in mid air, the bodies are cooked until they hit the ground. The force of the wind at thousands of mph will also rip the body apart.
If the craft does not break apart, and depending on the entry angle, it might slam into the ground at 200-700 mph depending on the shape of the object. The parts of the body will still be in the craft, but no longer together.
At least it’s not a slow death like cancer…
Others have answered your question, but I just wanted to make a point that bodies *are* found at plane crash sites. It’s never shown in media because of its horrifically gruesome nature. Hundreds of people crashing into the ground at 200-500mph is just as awful as you would think. You can find aftermath footage but I’d advise against it
So, if you have a rotted old pumpkin, and you were to just slap at it, claw at it, grab at it, your hands would go into it with little effort, and you could leave it unrecognizable in pretty short order.
Now, imagine WE’RE the pumpkin, and the seemingly superhuman power is the outside forces in a crash, such as metal parts, environmental objects, force from explosions, etc.
If our erratic pawing is way, way stronger than the integrity of the pumpkin, the forces in a crash are way, way stronger than the integrity of our bodies (essentially a big leather bag of bones and spaghetti)
So, while there are..uh..*remains* found…I’m not sure you could describe as “bodies”
After JAL 123 smashed into a side of a mountain at 390 mph, they still found bodies. What’s more, four passengers survived (it is estimated that there were 20-50 survivors of the original crash, but most died due to delayed response).
I remember as a kid watching Star Wars and asking my mom what happened to the pilots that got blown up during the main assault on the Death Star. That was day I learned about disintegration.
What I learned from a helicopter evacuation course is that it is close to impossible to find individuals in the ocean because they are too hard to see. Even with trackers, the area can be so large that even if you look in the right place with a helicopter, boat or plane, the odds of finding or spotting individual bodies scattered by the streams of the wind and the sea after a plane crash or something like it are very low.
>After the challenger explosion there weren’t any bodies either.
There were remains, but they were really messed up from impacting the water and then sinking.
The evidence indicates the bodies were probably still mostly intact until the crew module hit the water.
The remains were messed up bad enough that they couldn’t figure out what actually killed them before they hit the water
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