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brendanw

The human body can sustain a surprising amount of damage and still carry on.

Three different wingsuit pilots have survived unintentionally crashing into trees with no parachute out now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp3YLdhraPw

https://vimeo.com/50817449 (view at 6:35)

http://www.basejumper.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?post=2994...

And then you have Jeb Corliss crashing full speed into a mountain and surviving:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92-fNtnewxc

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Sadly these near miraculous cases are vastly outnumbered wingsuit accidents where the jumper was killed.

Your chances of surviving a wingsuit, or any kind of BASE jumping accident are considerably worse than your chances of surviving a single round of Russian roulette with five rounds in the cylinder, even if you're the only player.

Wouldn't you being the only player increase the chances of shooting yourself?

It would, but your odds of not shooting yourself are 1 in 6, assuming a standard 6 chambered cylinder. Your odds of surviving would be very slightly higher (depending on where you choose to shoot yourself) because, of course, a gunshot wound might not be fatal.

Like I say, your chances of surviving a wingsuit accident (basically impacting the ground, a cliff, a tree, whatever) are considerably worse than this.

That is indeed an incredible amount of dumb luck: hit the mountain with his legs, and there wasn't anything to hit directly after he tumbled. A few milliseconds' timing difference, and either clear pass or dead on impact.

That's the first thing I thought when I read about his injuries - the human body is remarkably fragile in most instances, but when it comes to the crunch, something often allows it to take a truly staggering amount of injury without dying. Some people's survival abilities are astonishing.

Sadly a lot of it is down to chance - speed and angle he hit the water, for example - and would be very difficult to ever repeat.

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