h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Flight Sergeant Nicholas Alkemade, Royal Air Force, had a hard choice to make in December 1943. His parachute was stowed in the hull of a Lanaster bomber that was in flames and about to go out of control. As the rear gunner, he could stay with the plane, hoping the pilot might be able to crash-land it with relative safety (the hull fire had destroyed the intercom, so he didn't know who else was still alive up front)

Or he could bale out sans chute.

He chose death by falling, to death by fire, and threw himself out of the escape door (the design flaw in British four-engine bombers was that the rear gunner AND his parachute could not get into the too-small turret together. Therefore the rear gunner had to stow the chute behind him in the hull, and hope he could get it on quickly in an emergency)

Alkemade remembers falling in a position that was like standing at attention, only tipped 70 degrees backwards from the vertical. Therefore his head and shoulders would have hit first.

Sudden death from a smashed skull and broken neck?

No, as from 25,000 feet, he fist crashed through the snow-covered branches of a fir forest, which acted to break his fall. When he finally fell through the tree cover, he then landed in deep snow - the angle of his fall making him into a human ski that surfed through and over the snow cover, and the slope of a mountain serving to gradually kill his speed as he approached the bottom, his only injuries being broken ribs and a broken leg.

The Germans who took him prisoner initially did not believe his story, but once the wreckage of a Lancaster was found, with a burnt parachute still stowed in the rear-gunnner's position, the Luftwaffe presented him with a signed certificate of survival which I beleive is still in the RAF museum today!

Alkemade held the world record (for falling the furthest without parachute and surviving) until the middle 1960's; a Yugoslavian air hostess somehow survived a mid-air explosion at 35,000 feet and was found still alive in the wreckage (see Guiness Book of Records?)

(It was said, in the immediate aftermath of the bomb-induced crash at Lockerbie, that an air stewardess had initially survived the fall but had died of her injuries on the way to the hospital)

Apparently the severed tail section glided down to earth in the manner of a sycamore seed and this served to break her fall, rather like the "windmilling" of an otherwise dead helicopter prop.

Then the was that bloke the other week who survived a sky-dive with two failed parachutes. Don't skydivers say the max damage is done if you bounce, and therefore the way to survive an uncontrolled fall with no chute is to grab the ground as you hit and hang on for dear life - this restricts injury to shock and beroken bones...