More Than Half of the Passengers Survived the Hindenburg
 Via Wikipedia
We realize this one probably doesn't apply directly to your life unless you intend to board a zeppelin built exactly like the Hindenburg at some point in the future (hey, who can say where life will take you?), but it's still a great example of how really hard it is to kill a human being.
After all, this is the freaking Hindenburg -- its very name is synonymous with an enormous ball of fire so big that it made a reporter shit his pants on the air. It wasn't the worst accident in history -- you can only fit so many people on board a blimp -- but it was certainly the most spectacular one ever captured on film.
The aircraft had its stunning explosion over Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937, and it was probably a good thing for the Nazis that the Zeppelin Company went against pressure from Joseph Goebbels to name the airship after Hitler. The accident resulted in 36 fatalities and a memorial not nearly as awkward as it could have been.
 Via Steubensociety.org
In an alternate history, the marker is known as the Adolf Hitler Memorial Plaque.
It's no wonder the video of this thing going up in flames became one of the most famous newsreels of all time -- the footage looked and sounded like an old-timey star destroyer going down. So for passengers on this doomed aircraft, they had to deal with not only being in the middle of a supernova of burning hydrogen gas, but also plummeting to the ground a second later.
Yet, incredibly, the odds of surviving the enormous fireball were actually pretty good. Out of the 97 passengers and crew aboard the floating airship, only 35 were killed when it exploded.
 Via Anus.com
What a 65 percent survival rate looks like.
The chief reason your chances of having survived the Hindenburg were "more than likely" instead of "zero" was because the mechanics of the disaster happened to play out like a quick-time event similar to something out of Resident Evil 4. All the passengers and cabins were on the underside of the airship, so once it went aflame and lost its lift, surviving just boiled down to timing. In the following video, you can actually see the passengers and crew waiting until the dying zeppelin slowly drifted close enough to the ground, pressing "X" to "jump" and then doing what any sane person would do: running like hell.
Also, you may have noticed that's 35 passengers and crew killed in a disaster involving 36 fatalities. That extra body was a particularly unlucky soul named Allen Hagaman, whose cause of death was having the fucking Hindenburg fall on top of him.
Read more: 7 Deadly Things You Won't Believe Most People Survive | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19698_7-deadly-things-you-wont-believe-most-people-survive_p2.html#ixzz1oMCwA2J5 |
