Against all odds

Can someone survive a 33,000 feet free fall? 10 amazing survival stories

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Every so often, we wonder how we’d respond if faced with the direst of circumstances—fighting tooth and nail through unimaginable dangers to survive. But beyond our wildest dreams, some individuals have demonstrated that the will to live can overcome even the most insurmountable odds. From a plane crash in the Andes mountains to being swept up by a tornado, these 10 stories of endurance, courage, and unbelievable luck shed light on the inherent grit of the human spirit.

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In 1972, a Uruguayan rugby team's plane crashed in the Andes mountains after the pilot made a critical navigation error. Of the 45 passengers aboard, 29 survived the initial impact. Stranded at nearly 11,500 feet without any means of communication, they endured brutal conditions for over two months. With starvation setting in, they made the harrowing decision to eat the frozen remains of their deceased companions.

When it became clear that no rescue was imminent, two of the survivors embarked on a desperate trek through the treacherous mountains. With no training or proper gear, they braved incredibly difficult terrain for ten days before encountering a local shepherd who alerted authorities. By the time the ordeal ended, only 16 survivors remained. Their incredible story quickly captured international attention and remains a powerful testament to human perseverance and the will to survive against all odds.

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In 1993, during a solo trip through Morocco, French electrician Emile Leray found himself stranded deep in the Sahara desert after his Citroën 2CV broke down from hitting a rock. With only enough food and water for ten days and no help in sight, Leray ingeniously dismantled his car and repurposed the parts to construct a makeshift motorcycle.

To shield himself from the relentless sun and frequent sandstorms, Leray used the car’s body as a shelter. After twelve days, with only half a liter of water remaining, he successfully escaped and rode towards the nearest village. Though his remarkable feat received little media coverage at the time, Leray earned the nickname "the extreme mechanic" for his extraordinary ingenuity and survival skills.

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Ada Blackjack was a Iñupiat woman who joined an ill-fated expedition to Wrangel Island in 1921 as a cook and seamstress. The expedition aimed to settle the island and claim it for the Canadian government (though at the time the territory technically belonged to Russia), and was organized with the backing of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a renowned Arctic explorer. Blackjack was meant to join other four young explorers on the dangerous journey.

However, the expedition was severely underprepared for the harsh Arctic conditions. As rations dwindled and the team failed to hunt enough game to sustain themselves, the situation grew dire. One of the young men succumbed to scurvy, while the other three got lost in a desperate attempt to seek help, leaving Ada completely alone in the Arctic—with only the expedition's cat for company. She survived for eight months in the extreme cold, teaching herself to hunt foxes and sew parkas from reindeer skins. She was finally rescued on August 19, 1923, and was hailed as a real-life female Robinson Crusoe for her remarkable survival skills.

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In 1981, Steven Callahan set sail from Cornwall aboard his self-built sailboat, Napoleon Solo, bound for Antigua as part of a solo sailing race. However, disaster struck during a night storm when his boat collided with an unknown hard object, causing it to take on water rapidly. With little time to think, Callahan desperately inflated his life raft and had to dive several times into the sinking vessel to retrieve essential survival gear.

Drifting westward with the trade winds for 76 harrowing days, Callahan faced all sorts of challenges aboard his raft, including shark encounters, raft punctures, and the mental strain of isolation. He mastered the use of solar stills to distill seawater and relied on fish, barnacles, and seabirds for sustenance. Despite activating his emergency beacon and signaling passing ships with a flare gun, his presence went unnoticed. Finally, near the island of Marie Galante, fishermen spotted him, drawn by the birds hovering above the raft, attracted by the small ecosystem that had developed around it. After his rescue, Callahan dedicated himself to designing improved life rafts, drawing from his extraordinary experience at sea.

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On Christmas Eve 1971, just a day after her graduation, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke boarded LANSA Flight 508 with her mother, heading to the biological research station in the Amazon rainforest where both her parents worked. During the flight, the airplane was struck by lightning, causing it to fall apart mid-air.

Still strapped to her seat, she plummeted 10,000 feet into the dense jungle and survived the fall with only minor injuries. Alone in the rainforest, she endured 11 days of hardship, following a river's course until she stumbled upon a lumberjack camp. There, she was rescued and eventually airlifted to safety. Despite the tragedy, Koepcke returned to the Panguana research station and continued her work, later becoming a renowned zoologist.

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In 2013, Harrison Okene, a Nigerian cook, was working aboard the Jascon-4, a tugboat assisting an oil tanker 20 miles off the coast of Nigeria when it suddenly capsized due to rough seas. The vessel quickly filled with water and sank to the seafloor, about 100 feet below the surface. Okene, who was in the bathroom at the time, miraculously found himself trapped in a small air pocket within the sunken ship, surrounded by darkness and freezing water.

For nearly three days, Okene survived in the pitch-black cabin, enduring the cold and the terrifying uncertainty of whether rescue would come. With no food and only a can of Coca-Cola to sustain him, he clung to hope. On the third day, divers surveying the wreck for recovery operations were shocked to hear his hammering against the hull. They discovered Okene alive, and he was safely rescued after being placed in a decompression chamber. Despite his harrowing experience, Okene later became a professional diver, working on underwater installations and repairs for oil and gas facilities—a remarkable twist for someone who had once been so close to death beneath the sea.

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Serbian flight attendant Vesna Vulović holds the world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute. In 1972, after her plane exploded mid-air, she fell over 33,000 feet to the ground. Miraculously, her fall was cushioned by a snowy mountainside. She was later discovered alive alongside the wreckage by a local villager who tended her until rescuers arrived.

Despite sustaining severe injuries, including a fractured skull and broken legs, Vulović survived the ordeal but had total amnesia of the incident for a month afterward. Remarkably, she recovered almost fully, though she lived with a limp for the rest of her life. Vulović later attributed her astonishing survival and recovery to her "Serbian stubbornness" and a childhood diet rich in "chocolate, spinach, and fish oil."

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In 1965, six Tongan schoolboys were shipwrecked on a deserted island in the South Pacific for 15 months. The boys, all pupils at a strict Catholic boarding school, were bored out of their minds, and one day decided they had had enough. A plan to escape to Fiji, or perhaps even to New Zealand, formed in their minds. They stole a fisherman’s boat, and finally set out to sea, only to be caught in a storm.

Being inexperienced sailors, they quickly became adrift when the sails were shredded and the rudder broke. After eight days with no food and water, they spotted a small island on the horizon, where they promptly set camp. Unlike the fictional Lord of the Flies, however, these boys cooperated to survive. They set up a communal system, created a garden, and built shelter until they were rescued by a passing fisherman.

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Charles Joughin, the chief baker aboard the Titanic, survived the 1912 disaster by staying remarkably calm—and by getting drunk. Yes, you read that right. With a lifetime of experience at sea, Joughin was assigned a spot on one of the lifeboats but refused to board, giving his place to other crew members.

After all the lifeboats had been lowered, Joughin returned to his quarters and had a few whiskeys. As the ship continued to sink, he threw around 50 deck chairs overboard to serve as flotation devices. Unfazed, he walked to the ship's highest point and waited for it to submerge, making him the last survivor to leave the Titanic. Incredibly, he spent several hours in the freezing Atlantic before being rescued. It's speculated that the alcohol helped him stave off the effects of cold and fear, enabling his incredible survival.

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Matt Suter was 19 years old when a tornado in Missouri picked him up and carried him 1,307 feet before dropping him in a field. Amazingly, he survived with only minor injuries. Suter recalls hearing a deafening roar as the tornado approached the mobile home where he was staying with his grandmother. Suddenly, the tornado struck with full force, collapsing the walls and blowing open the doors and windows.

Just before being sucked outside, a lamp struck him on the head, knocking him unconscious. When he came to, he found himself lying in a field, wearing only his underwear, badly scratched and bruised but otherwise unharmed. Suter’s survival is considered miraculous by tornado researchers, and he currently holds the record for the longest distance traveled by a person in a tornado.

TO EACH THEIR OWN, RIGHT?

From Nurses To Air Traffic Operators: 10 Nerve-Wracking Jobs

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Some of the jobs on this list are pretty obvious. Fighting fire amid screams and people in mortal danger is a spectacularly stressful situation, even for someone who does it for a living. But some others might come as a bit of a surprise, that is, for the people who are not directly involved in such occupations.

Whether you are coordinating commercial air flights, drunken crowds, or unruly children, whether you are saving someone’s life or closing an important business deal, there is always plenty of stress to go around. Take a look at the following ten gigs and make up your mind as to which of these would be the most stressful for you.

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With heavy responsibilities that involve other people’s lives in a very direct way, nurses collaborate with other health professionals to treat diseases and promote their patients' health and well-being.

Their responsibilities include administering medicine, monitoring patients, assisting with lab tests, and organizing patient files. They often have to be on their feet for long hours, with intense schedules, as hospitals may require them to come in on short notice.

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Working well outside school hours, grading papers, going over curricula, dealing with undisciplined kids, dealing with undisciplined kids’s parents, and a thousand more chores are the daily routine of a teacher that, let’s face it, will never get rich by doing her/his job.

The huge responsibility that involves taking care of other people’s children and doing one’s best to impart valuable lessons and education to an audience that is usually apathetic at best makes the role of a teacher, a very stressful and demanding one.

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One would be forgiven to think that a job that entails being around happy situations all the time, is quite a joyous experience. But the truth is that being an event planner and coordinator is nothing short of a stressful endeavor.

Imagine having to coordinate and choreograph the multiple aspects and actors of a one-time event that must turn out perfect or otherwise your reputation will suffer greatly. And this must be accomplished while dealing with unforeseen situations and let’s face it, demanding and often drunk people. In a nutshell, that is the daily bread of event planning and coordination.

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Encouraging social development and assisting the most disadvantaged members of society can be a very satisfying occupation. Social workers focus on prominent social issues like homelessness, addiction, and abuse. But this often entails working with people in difficult situations that can be dangerous.

We never know how people who are dealing with extremely stressful situations will react and that is the very core of a social worker's daily duties. Much like a police officer, a social worker often encounters individuals who are going through the worst time of their lives and she/he has to deal with these people calmly and soothingly. This requires a huge amount of patience and the ability to cope with stress, without showing it.

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Juggling with the lives of hundreds of passengers and crews who are, literally, in the air, might sound a bit poetic -sort of- but it is a pretty accurate description of an air traffic controller’s job.

This profession entails coordinating landings and takeoffs, incoming and outgoing air traffic, and checking on the status of every single aircraft in their area of operation. If this doesn’t sound like an incredibly stressful job to you, then you might have worked in one of the last positions on this list.

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Dealing with other people’s money can be quite stressful. Managing all the business operations, setting organizational goals, and managing budgets for huge companies with huge pockets is certainly a very stressful job.

Bad decisions can end up in massive losses and layoffs with devastating consequences. All of these are usually the responsibility of a single manager who struggles to meet deadlines and financial goals while maintaining the team’s morale and dealing with personal situations and unforeseen situations.

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Picture having to administer a potent chemical to a human being in a dose so precise that, if done wrong, could have fatal consequences. An anesthesiologist is a health care professional who monitors patient health during a procedure, adjusting the amount of anesthetic to relieve pain.

While relieving pain can be a satisfying job, the need for precision and constant vigilance, along with the potential for severe complications and the unpredictability of patient responses, makes this a very stressful job.

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If your daily routine entails being the first responder in a dramatic emergency we can safely assume that stress is a trusty companion, albeit, not a pleasant one. Paramedics are highly trained professionals who assess, treat, and transport patients who need urgent medical attention. Sure, this can be a rewarding job but it is very mentally and physically taxing.

Paramedics often operate in dangerous, high-pressure environments where split-second decisions can mean life or death. The threat of violence combined with witnessing trauma daily contributes to extremely high rates of stress, depression, and anxiety among first responders.

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Possibly very few jobs involve dealing with such a huge variety of life-threatening situations as police work does. The whole spectrum of human reactions and emotions is a real chance when the duty calls.

Police officers go on regular patrols, apprehend criminals, respond to emergency calls, and investigate crimes. They regularly engage violent people in dangerous and volatile situations. Sometimes, their duties require the use of lethal force to contain threats, making the role physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding.

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This one should come as no surprise. When your daily job is almost every other person’s worst nightmare, stress is a thing you learn to live and cope with. Dealing with life and death situations, all while in a flaming inferno, is not an occupation suited for the faint of heart.

Saying that this is a vocational calling is falling short of the truth. Firefighters respond to emergencies involving fires, hazardous materials, and other disasters, all for a not-so-great paycheck. Talk about stress for the sake of it.