I have heard that if you tense or brace your body before a car accident you are more likely to be injured. Hence why drunk drivers often walk away unharmed because they just sort of flop around instead. So why is it that we are supposed to brace for impact?
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Plane crashes and car crashes are very different from each other.
In a car crash you are de/accelerating much more abruptly . In a plane crash you stop over a much longer period of time due to the planes massive inertia and the fact that the chunk of plane in front of you will absorb a lot of the energy.(unless you are sitting in the pilots seat and are crashing at a 90deg angle to the floor lol)
The brace position in plane crashes is designed to prevent your neck from experiencing whiplash and to protect your head from debris.
Bracing for impact in a plane is putting your head between your knees and trying to protect your skull with your arms. If a plane crashes there is going to be luggage and whatever other loose things are around flying everywhere so if you somehow survive the impact you will not want to get hit in the head by all the junk.
In a car it is possible that stiffening up and jamming your hands out in front of you could cause more damage than someone who was unaware of an impending accident. A plane though, if it is something you can actually survive it probably will not matter if you “saw it coming” or not.
Bracing doesn’t mean going stiff, it means protecting your head and neck by moving into a certain position, because you are t I. A 3 point seatbelt like in cards, and there will definite stuff thrown around. No rigidity required.
Also, you have a lot of time to prepare for an airplane crash.
If you’re nosing into the ground at 400 mph, the only thing that will save you is Jesus. But if it’s like a malfunction and you’re flying to a landing in a forest or something, you’re trying to decelerate from 160 kt to 0 in the longest time possible. There’s no comparable car crash, which are all of the “sudden and catastrophic” variety
“Surviving a car accident by being relaxed” is a huge misconception. Drunk drivers often fare well because they (drunkenly) drive into other vehicles and are protected by the whole front of their car which is meant to absorb impacts. Their victims do worse because they’re getting hit on the side of the vehicle, which offers less protection. Also, plenty of drunk drivers die horribly, it just isn’t made as public because nobody is going to prosecute a corpse for DUI. When the drunk driver survives and the other victim dies, there are lots of headlines about it.
If you’re in a potentially fatal car/plane accident, the forces involved are so far beyond what your body can generate that it really doesn’t matter how tense or relaxed you are. The crash landing position on a plane is meant to reduce your head suddenly swinging forward and causing a major brain/spine injury.
Bracing in a car accident is a very real thing you just do it differently, don’t put your arms where they are going to get destroyed by air bags.
There some videos of some crash testers (real people, not dummies) and they basically use their legs to push their back into their seat as hard as possible (do not fully lockout your knees, slight bend, but consistent force) and they are usually fine.
The goal of a car crash is to get your body to slow down at the same speed as the dashboard. So if there were no airbags to consider, you would be the safest being plastered to the dash at the time of (front) impact. Airbags extend the dash into you to get you to slow down at the same speed.
Airplanes have no airbags, so the best position for you to be in is full contact with the thing that’s going to slow you down. That’s your seatbelt and the chair in front of you.
A lot of shit they say in movies isn’t real. If a place is about to crash they’ll say something like “fuck fuck fuck oh shit” according to actual black box recordings.
Another example is “THIS IS NOT A DRILL!!” No one actually says “this is not a drill” in a serious situation where people are trained to respond.. like military movies/shows or such.
Bracing doesn’t kill you. Getting T-boned does. Impacting your face or torso very hard against part of the passenger compartment or having the compartment crushed around you is exceedingly lethal. Look at the injuries when people fall vs what ragdolling dummies get on shockwatch stickers? Mythbusters had multiple cases where falling speeds that weren’t even equivalent to second storey window (i.e. should be completely harmless if landed remotely well) tripped Buster’s 75 or 100 G shockwatch in both head and thorax.
Or just look at the injuries from falling off a bike with no helmet or tripping over your own feet, vs ragdolling in those situations. Difference been a serious concussion or even a broken rib or skull fracture vs some mild scuffed hands and knees.
Or look at how cats land a fall? They flip forward and shove their legs at the ground arching their strong backs. They try to put as much between their vitals and the thing they are colliding with as they can. That’s why cats survive >20 meter falls most of the time. A cat that just relaxed world hit its head and torso every time.
I took an aerospace standards and certifications course for engineers, where we covered this sort of thing.
The top comment is pretty spot on but is missing the most important thing.
Basically a lot of deaths or permanent injury from a hard landing come from secondary trauma. Either from hitting your head twice due to whiplash or getting hit in the head from unsecured items. Two concussions, one after another are really really bad.
On top of that bracing secures your head and upper body so you don’t have whiplash which can be debilitating in the long term and can prevent you from leaving the aircraft under your own power in the short term.
Lastly, in a car accident you do not have time to brace. Second if you are in the front seat then bracing in the front seat will kill you because placing your head against the steering wheel or dash will cause your head to move into a position that is incompatible with life once the airbag deploys.
Imo for rear passengers bracing is probably effective but because car crashes happen suddenly, it is basically impossible.
Also i am pretty sure this idea that drunk drivers survive car accidents because they are unable to brace is false (i seem to recall reading some expert analysis that confirms this). It does not make sense from an engineering perspective. If it did we would design car safety systems around the idea of having the body be flexible during a crash. But in fact we do the opposite. We have seat belts and head rests to prevent as much movement as possible.
Imo it is most likely that drunk drivers by virtue of being the one to cause an accident have a larger opportunity to maneuver the vehicle so that they are less likely to be killed. To quote Dwight Shrute “In the event of a crash the driver always protects his side first”.
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