DROPPING TO DEATH

Waikato Independent, Volume XXIV, Issue 3230, 10 June 1924, Page 2

DROPPING TO DEATH

| WHAT IT FEELS LIKE. "PLENTY OF TIME TO THINK." The steeplejack, who feels the ladder to which he is clinging slowly tear away from the top of the 300-foot chimney; the airman, who looks over his shoulder to see the tail of his machine carried away as he a 2000-foot dive to death; the platelayer, who looks up from his work to see the express within ten feet of him— : \vhn.t emotions do these men experience in those few seconds, when, with senses at the acutest pitch, they get a '"closeup" of death? Reading of these frequent tragedies we satisfy ourselves with the smug consolation that the steeplejack and the airman would he reduced to a state of unconsciousness by the rush of air long before they reached the ground, and that the platelayer would be killed painlessly and instantaneously—almost before the eye had time to convey the message of danger to the brain. We were happy to believe this —until, in the last day or two, men have come back from, "certain death" and told us that those dreadful seconds of realisation are as long as years;

A steeplejack was blown "off the .top of a Birmingham chimney. He fell in all .100 feet, striking in his descent first the staging around the- chimney, and then the roof of an adjoining building, before reaching the ground. "I realised I was falling," he siid, "just as one is conscious of losing his balance off a chair when hanging curtains. You have time to make a grab at the curtain, and if you miss it, often time to so alter your position that the hand, in the effort to save yourself, is the first part of you to reach the floor—and that fall is under two feet. A eaf ca.n prepare itself in less than that distance." Perfectly Conscious.

"I made up my mind to grab the staging—it was about 20 feet below — and turned myself round in the air to get into position, but I was going too fast, and the scaffolding nearly tore'my arms out. After the first moment the sense of fear left me, and after passing the scaffolding my chief thought was to reach the steeply sloping roof below me. I landed on this on all fours, rolled over and dropped to the ground—a few bones broken, but perfectly conscious throughout."

And then comes possibly the most interesting point.- "I always had in mind," he continued, "the possibility of .falling,'laiul was constantly revolving in my mind some means of escape. I knew that scaffolding and roof wcro there —I could have found them with my eyes shut." ~ This reminds one of the Sydney journalist who nonchalantly dusted his clothes after being run over by a large motor ear at .the top of William St. "Lucky you..weren't killed," said his friend.

"Lucky? Oh, not a bit of it," was the reply. "Years ago I decided that if over I saw I was going to be knocked down I would throw myself flat on the i ground and let the thing pass over nie. You see. I did so." Beady for Emergencies. Evidence of a similar mental prearrangement of "what I shall do if so-and-so happens" was remarkably demonstrated at Biggin Hill aerodrome the other morning when a bombing aeroplane nose-dived and crashed during a stunt for an Empire Exhibition film. Two officers in the forward part of the machine were burned to death in the wreckage, but a sergeant in the after eoclc-pit jumped as the machine was passing low over some trees at close on a hundred miles an hour. He bounced oil the branches and escaped with a' i'cw bruises. Congratulated on his providential escape from certain death the sergeant said: "I always had it here (lapping his forehead) that I should never I stop in a falling machine long enough to he pinned in the wreckage and roasted alive. 1 saw the crash coming and I hopped it just in time. Lucky I have worked it all out beforehand." Frequently bodies of aeroplane pilots are found "some distance from the wreckage," as the newspapers put if, which indicates that the pilot while falling at. incredible speed from some immense height had made an effort to save himself. Jumped too Soon. E. C. 0. Heme, who has won much fame as a cross-channel pilot, once mentioned to Die that while testing newtypes of army machines he had frequently fallen out of control from considerable heights, but never from the moment of losing control to the time he regained it had he ever so far forgotten himself as not to be able to relate minutely the evolutions the machine performed and what response the machine made to the controls. "1 was always ready," he said, "for the moment to unlossen my belt." This is what poor Travel's did when he encountered that extraordinary air pocket at Croydon aerodrome last month. It was a matter of less than a. second from the time the aeroplane was seen to be out of control and the time he jumped. But he misjudged the distance and jumped too soon. Everybody, sub-consciously perhaps, has these little mental pre-arrange-

iiH'i:,.- , ■., i-arrv i.iivj eliVc 1 .; ill cum! of emergency. Why is it necessary for the railway porter.-' to continually shout: — "More room in front and rear of (he train." simply because numbers of people after reading about a railway accident have made a mental note that th«* middle carriages are the safest.