It will also paralyze all other muscles below this level. Either the carotid or vertebral arteries supplying blood to the brain may also be damaged by the shear forces of the neck being snapped, referred to as dissection. This would cause ischemia to the areas of the brain supplied by those arteries. The 'Lethal Neck Snap' is a modern fictional convention akin to the 'Knockout Karate Chop to the Base of the Neck' that was in vogue in the '60s and '70s. A broken neck is potentially quite dangerous, for the reason you give, but not necessarily instantaneous, and certainly not able to be inflicted reliably in the fashion it's usually shown.
Flying commercially requires that we entrust our continued existence to others — namely, the engineers who built the plane, the ground crew that maintains it, and the flight crew that takes it into the skies. That sense of not being in charge of our fate, of instead having to helplessly place it in the hands of others, magnifies our more ordinary flying-related anxieties that have to do with the speed and heights attained via that mode of travel.
When those anxieties are teamed with the typical mistrust of Big Business harbored by the average consumer (who sees it as impersonal and profit-driven to the point of irresponsibility), all manner of wild beliefs can result. In the case of the ‘crash’ or ‘brace’ position the air industry recommends in the event of an impending mishap, those beliefs focus upon the presumed reason for turning oneself into a pretzel even as eternity beckons. Surely, says logic, leaning forward and covering my head with my hands isn’t going to keep me alive if this thing falls from the sky, so there must be some other reason the airlines want me to do this.
That line of reasoning has resulted in two fanciful explanations. First, that due to the relative sizes of wrongful death versus injury awards, airlines would rather have us pushing up daisies than disabled and so work to ensure our demise when one of their planes is going down. Better to snap our necks on impact and so be done with us than risk some of us surviving the crash and successfully suing for millions. In a more charitable form of the rumor, the airlines’ motivation for getting us to crouch in a death-dealing pose is their desire to spare us needless suffering: since we’re all doomed anyway, better a quick exit than a slow one. Alternatively, their interest is said to lie in having a neat accident scene. Post-crash, says this version of the belief, the airlines’ priority is not our welfare but rather accurate record-keeping, and our having been in the ‘brace’ position at impact guarantees them an easier job of matching up body parts with the passenger list of a downed aircraft.
Mistrust and farfetched rumors aside, adopting the ‘brace’ or ‘crash’ position when impact is imminent does indeed work to preserve lives in an air disaster. As Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) points out, “Over 70% of airline accidents are survivable. 71% of people who die in survivable crashes, do so after the aircraft comes to a complete stop. In many cases its because they are unprepared for the crash.”
According to the Federal Aviation Administration, there are two primary reasons for bracing for impact, neither of which has to do with quickly dispatching those who were about to die anyway or better preserving what will be left of them post-crash so as to speed identification of bodies. One purpose is to reduce flailing, and the other is to decrease secondary impact. Flailing can be cut back by having the seat occupant in some manner flex, bend, or lean forward over his legs. Secondary impact can be lessened by positioning the body (particularly the head) against the surface it would strike during impact. Reduction of either or both of these results in fewer and less severe injuries.
A particularly memorable 1989 air disaster in which 47 of those aboard died and an additional 74 were injured prompted recommendation of changes to the then prescribed ‘brace’ position. Analysis of the injuries sustained in the 8 January 1989 crash of British Midland Flight 92 onto the embankment of the M1 motorway in England (which has come to be known as the Kegworth crash) showed that many of them had been caused by passengers’ legs flailing against seat backs and luggage restraint bars and that certain small changes to the position adopted by passengers just prior to a crash would reduce the incidence of such traumas.
The modified “brace for crash” position requires passengers to keep their feet further back than their knees as they bend the upper portion of their bodies forward, and to wear their seat belts as tight and as low on their torsos as they can. If seatbacks in front are not reachable, passengers bend from the waist as far as possible, bringing their chests down onto their thighs, their arms around or behind their legs and tucked in against their bodies. If seatbacks are within reach, passengers rest their heads against them, place their hands one over the other on top of their heads (but without intertwining their fingers), and tuck their forearms in against each side of their faces.
Reporting on the East Midlands Boeing crash, a medical journal noted:
Of the initial 87 survivors of the East Midlands Boeing 737/400 aircraft, 77 sustained head and facial trauma during the crash, 45 of whom were rendered unconscious. There were 21 who received injuries to the back of their head, including 5 of the 6 severely head-injured adults. Those passengers who adopted the fully flexed “brace” position for crash-landing achieved significant protection against head injury, concussion, and injuries from behind irrespective of local aircraft structural damage.
That same report stated that “bracing maximizes the chance of uninjured survival. Call of duty modern warfare 3 1.9.461. ” Best skating games for mac.
Intriguingly, in 2009 we encountered another airline disaster rumor related to the brace position one:
I heard that the oxygen masks that deploy from overhead on airplanes are not actually oxygen masks to help you breathe, but somehow deprives you of oxygen (thus creating some sort of calming effect on your brain?) making you accept your death better.
In the final days of 2006, former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein was hanged for the 1982 murders of 148 people in Dujail, Iraq. While capital punishment is still on the books in many countries around the world, death by hanging has in many cases been replaced by more sterile killing methods like lethal injection, which some believe to be a more humane form of execution. Many people might be surprised to learn that hanging, when carried out with modern techniques, can be one of the quickest and most painless ways to be executed.
The modern method of judicial hanging is called the long drop. This is the method that Iraqi officials used to execute Saddam Hussein. In the long drop, those planning the execution calculate the drop distance required to break the subject's neck based on his or her weight, height and build. They typically aim to get the body moving quickly enough after the trap door opens to produce between 1,000 and 1,250 foot-pounds of torque on the neck when the noose jerks tight. This distance can be anywhere from 5 to 9 feet (1.5 to 2.7 meters). With the knot of the noose placed at the left side of the subject's neck, under the jaw, the jolt to the neck at the end of the drop is enough to break or dislocate a neck bone called the axis, which in turn should sever the spinal cord. In some cases, the hangman jerks up on the rope at the precise moment when the drop is ending in order to facilitate the breakage.
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This is the ideal situation in a long drop. When the neck breaks and severs the spine, blood pressure drops down to nothing in about a second, and the subject loses consciousness. Brain death then takes several minutes to occur, and complete death can take more than 15 or 20 minutes, but the person at the end of the rope most likely can't feel or experience any of it.
On the next page, we'll learn about other kinds of hangings and how they cause death.
In a less-than-ideal long drop, if the distance is miscalculated or some other factor misses the mark, the subject will die of decapitation (if the drop is too long) or of strangulation (if the drop is too short or the noose knot isn't in the correct position). Strangulation can take several minutes and is a far more excruciating experience. The carotid arteries in the neck, which supply blood to the brain, are compressed, and the brain swells so much it ends up plugging the top of the spinal column; the Vagal nerve is pinched, leading to something called the Vagal reflex, which stops the heart; and the lack of oxygen getting to the lungs due to compression of the trachea eventually causes loss of consciousness due to suffocation. Death then follows in the same pattern as it does when the neck breaks, with the entire process ending in anywhere from five to 20 minutes.
When it comes to judicial hanging, the long drop is the most humane way to go. For the person being executed, the actual experience of the hanging lasts anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes -- or at least that's the general belief by forensic scientists. In some countries where executions are carried out by hanging, though, other methods are used. In the short drop, which can be a few inches to a few feet, the subject invariably dies of strangulation and/or the compression of the arteries in the neck. The same type of death occurs in suspension hanging, in which the subject is jerked into the air instead of being dropped. And in a standard-drop hanging, the subjects falls about 5 feet. Depending on the weight and build of the subject, this drop will either break the neck and spinal cord or cause death by strangulation, carotid-artery compression or Vagal reflex. In these older methods, unconsciousness still typically occurs in anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes, but if it turns out to be a few seconds, it's blind luck (or bad luck, depending on how the country's legal system views the practice -- if the point of the hanging is severe punishment for the subject and deterrence to other would-be criminals, a 'good hang' may be the most gruesome experience possible).
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Hanging is a legal method of judicial execution in 58 countries, according to Amnesty International. In 33 of those countries, it is the only method of execution. In the United States, judicial hanging is legal in both Washington state and Delaware, and three prisoners have been hanged since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976.
For more information on judicial hanging and related topics, check out the links on the next page.
Related HowStuffWorks Articles
- How Anesthesia Works
Neck Snapping Sound
- The Times Online-Swift End Rests with Skill of the Hangman - Jan 1, 2007
- ABC News: Death By Hanging: What Saddam Faced - Dec. 29, 2006
Neck Snapping Techniques
Sources
- Childs, Dan. 'Death By Hanging: What Saddam Faced.' ABC News. Dec. 29, 2006.http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2759048&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312
- 'The process of judicial hanging.' Capital Punishment U.K.http://www.richard.clark32.btinternet.co.uk/hanging2.html
- Stuttaford, Thomas. 'Swift end rests with skill of the hangman.' The Times Online. Jan. 1, 2007.http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,3-2526006,00.html