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
There are photos of MH17 after it was shot down. There are pictures of the dead passengers on some of the photos.
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’.
>In plane crashes, clothes and pieces of the aircraft are found, but no bodies.
>
>After the challenger explosion there weren’t any bodies either.
Unfortunately, the premise of your question is simply incorrect.
When large commercial jet aircraft crash over land, they absolutely **do** recover bodies.
Likewise with Challenger, bodies **were recovered**.
In the news, they generally *do* mention when bodies have been recovered. Again, your premise is incorrect.
Regarding point B… When such huge forces are involved, the human body simply breaks apart. It’s gruesome. There’s some truly awful stuff floating around on the internet, and honestly I recommend that you resist your morbid curiosity and **DO NOT LOOK FOR THESE IMAGES**.
I remember seeing photographs of a man, who had killed himself by riding his motorcycle into the side of a building at 100mph~.
His body was *broken* for lack of a better word. I will never forget seeing a photo of this mans foot, which was retrieved from inside the ceiling space of the building. That was nearly 20 years ago and it is burned into my memory.
I have 2 family members that were involved in the Swiss Air crash clean up in 1998. They spent more time collecting pieces of people, not whole people. There was at least one skin suit still seat belted in. Parts of people were nibbled on. And they had to pick up every possible bit to be able provide as much information as possible.
The stories are both riveting and horrifying. Also the “funny parts” in the whole experience like trying to land a zodiac on an oil slick beach. Disasters are gruesome
> What happens to them?
Shredded.
> They never go into detail about bodies
Now you know why.
Tangentially related. We now know that once a javelin missile hits a tank and the tank burns, there are no bodies inside. Not even bones.
I have been looking thru a few of those and failed to locate even a single tiny bit of a bone. Nothing. Burned beyond ashes.
It’s not that they don’t find the bodies, it’s that the bodies they find closer resemble spaghetti than bodies
Here’s a visual.
Take an egg, stand on a sidewalk, and throw it as hard as you can at the ground.
Imagine a plane travelling at 400mph hitting the ground.
Same thing.
We do find bodies in plane crashes I’m not sure where you heard that we don’t but we definitely do.
Oh, my. Tell this to my dad, who was testing a new buoy tender and got diverted to the TWA crash site.
Latest Answers