On January 3, 1943, a B-17 named Snap! Crackle! Pop! was on its way to bomb German submarine base in St. Nazaire, France. Staff Sgt. Alan Magee was sitting in the ball turret. The lot of ball turret gunners was not an easy one. Apart from being a prime target for enemy fighters, which tried to eliminate gunners first, they were crammed into a very small space beneath the fuselage.
So small, in fact, that Magee kept his parachute up in the fuselage. When they got badly hit by flak fire on that mission, he climbed into the fuselage only to find out his parachute riddled by shrapnel. He could not bail out now. As he was pondering over what to do next, the B-17 was hit by yet another charge, and the next moment Magee was out of the plane and unconscious.
Magee fell some 22,000 feet, without a parachute and unconscious for the most part of his free fall. He landed on the glass roof of St. Nazaire train station, breaking it through and getting stuck in between the steel girders which supported the ceiling. He suffered multiple injuries, of course, including a broken leg and a badly cut arm, but he lived. In captivity Magee was treated by a German doctor, who managed to save him his arm. Two more members of Snap! Crackle! Pop! crew survived, and the others perished. Magee died in 2003.
Magee’s survival seems absolutely miraculous, but amazingly he’s not the only one to have survived such a free fall. A year before that a Russian navigator 1st Lt. Ivan Chisov bailed out of Ilyushin Il-4 bomber hit in a fighter attack. His parachute failed to open, but Chisov stayed alive after falling some 22,000 feet, thanks to landing on a snowy slope.
And a year after Magee, in 1944 a British tail gunner Nicholas Alkemade jumped out of burning Lancaster Mk II without his parachute, because it was already in flames. Alkemade survived an 18,000 feet fall by landing on some pine trees and then into deep snow. He did not have a single bone fractured.
Civil aviation has seen some similar miracles as well. Among them are the stories of Juliane Koepcke and Vesna Vulovic. Koepcke managed to stay alive after falling out of exploded Lockheed Electra and into Amazonian wilderness in 1971. A year later Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant, fell from a DC-9 airliner, which exploded at 33,000 feet. She landed on a snowy slope and lived. These two, however, were, unlike Magee, Chisov, and Alkemade, falling fastened to their seats, which slightly increased their survival chances.
