vf wing said:
I don't follow the show, but I did catch part of the one where they did the raft. IIRC, they busted it on somewhat shaky grounds. They actually demonstrated that it might be possible to survive the fall that way, but concluded that the premise was busted anyway, saying you couldn't inflate the raft fast enough, and maybe some other nonsense.
Yeah, I didn't consider that busted at all.
They did demonstrate, theoretically, that there would be enough drag on an inflated raft to slow you down.
Unfortunately, none of their dummies stayed put enough for it to work properly.
They said that the inflating would be the tricky part - you can't inflate in the plane, since you then can't get out with it and that you can't inflate outside the plane (they were using an escape slide), since the wind would tear the slide away from you.
However, as depicted in the film, if you were holding onto the raft with it beneath you and THEN jumped and inflated it....I dunno, as specifically portrayed in the movie, it still seems possible.