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    No matter how many times we get in an airplane, there’s still the creeping fear that we’re going to plummet to our deaths through no fault of our own. It’s pretty tough to survive a plane crash, but some solid dudes have done it. Here are 10 terrifying tales of guys who fell from the sky and lived to tell the tale.

    Michael Trapp
    Water landings are some of the scariest crashes. The plane hits just as hard as it would on land, but you’ve got nowhere to run to. When the two-seat Cessna piloted by Michael Trapp to a family reunion in Eau Claire, Wis. went down in the middle of Lake Huron, he thought he was done for. His cell phone and the emergency beacon both sank to the bottom, and he had no life jacket. Amazingly, Trapp managed to tread water for 18 straight hours, holding out until a couple in a yacht picked him up.
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    Nicholas Alkemade

    World War II gave lots of opportunities for people to die in the air, but every once in a while a miracle happened. For the case of British tailgunner Nicholas Alkemade, he caught the break of a lifetime. Literally. When his plane was shot down over Schmallenberg, Germany, Alkemade’s parachute was destroyed. He decided to jump without one, preferring a quick death by hitting the ground to a slower one by burning to death. Remarkably, despite plummeting 18,000 feet, he survived with only a sprained leg due to a canopy of pine trees slowing his fall and heavy snow cover on the ground. Sure, he was captured by the Nazis after that, but you can’t win ‘em all.
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    George Lamson

    Some of these stories are pretty intense, with these guys using all of the survival skills in their inventory to escape the crash site and return to civilization. And some are just weird as hell. On January 21, 1985, a Galaxy Airlines flight from Reno to Minneapolis went down shortly after takeoff. The wreck was horrific, with the body of the aging Lockheed Electra devastated by fire. And yet there was one survivor: 17-year-old George Lamson, who was found strapped into his seat in the middle of Highway 395, sitting upright and relatively unharmed.
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    Nestor Mata

    In 1957, a plane took off from Lahug Airport in the Philippines, carrying President Ramon Magsaysay and much of his cabinet. Unfortunately, it wasn’t gaining altitude fast enough to fly above the treacherous Balamban mountain ranges, crashing into a hillside. Only one man survived, an aide named Nestor Mata. Luckily for him, he was found by natives and carried on a hammock for 18 hours back to Cebu, where he was treated for second-degree and third-degree burns. His first words were a dispatch to the newspaper telling the country that their president was dead.
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    Charles Woods

    Any landing you walk away from is a good landing, or so they say, but I bet Charles Woods wishes he could take back a flight in 1944. Woods was taking off from Kurmitola, India with a cargo of 28,000 pounds of airplane fuel. His co-pilot was a trainee and braked too soon at takeoff, causing the airplane to explode before it even left the ground. Charles Woods was the only survivor, suffering burns over 70 percent of his body. He underwent dozens of painful operations to rebuild his face and replace his skin and eventually became a multi-millionaire.
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    Martin Farkas

    Interestingly enough, if your plane is going down and you have no way of escaping it, the safest place to be is actually the bathroom. In 2006, an Antonov AN-24 plane owned by the Slovak military, crashed just inside Hungary, the deadliest air disaster in Slovakian history. The plane was returning a crew of peacekeepers who had just finished a six-month stint in Kosovo. It scraped the tops of trees with its fuselage and caught fire before crashing to the ground. One man survived: First Lieutenant Martin Farkas, who had been in the john when the plane crashed, keeping him relatively intact.
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    Minor Vidal

    Crashing into civilization is one thing, but it’s even harder to survive when your plane goes down in the middle of nowhere. For Minor Vidal, a Bolivian cosmetics salesman, things looked bleak when the small plane he was in went down over the Amazon. Vidal was the only survivor, but suffered serious injuries to the head and ribs. He survived in the jungle for 62 hours before he was rescued. His saviors found him by following the arrow he’d painted on the ground with his own blood.
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    Bruce Mallibert

    It’s one thing to survive when a plane hits the ground. It’s something completely different when a plane hits another plane, and to our knowledge there’s only one story of somebody surviving a mid-air collision. In 1973, a Convair 990 jet and a Navy P-3 Orion collided in the air above Moffett Field, sending a fireball of airplane parts and burning corpses into a nearby golf course. Golfers ran up to the fuselages to try to save passengers, and one man was still alive: Petty Officer Bruce Mallibert. A parachute was thrown over him to protect him, but then a fire truck drove right over the parachute. He lived, but wound up paralyzed in both arms and legs.
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    Juliane Kopcke

    On Christmas Eve, 1971, an airliner took off from Jorge Chavez International Airport in Peru, en route to Pucallpa. At 22,000 feet, it was struck by lightning and sent into a free-fall dive into the Amazon mountains. One woman survived: 17-year-old Juliane Kopcke. Stranded in the middle of nowhere with no food or water, Kopcke wandered through the jungle for nine days before finding a logging camp and being returned to civilization.
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    Norman Ollestad

    One of the most amazing plane-crash-survival stories in history belongs to a very unlikely subject: an 11-year-old boy. In 1979, a chartered Cessna carrying Norman Ollestad, his father, his father’s girlfriend and a pilot crashed broadside into the San Gabriel Mountains. The elder Ollestad and the pilot were killed instantly, leaving the boy and the woman to make the perilous descent from 8,000 feet alone. The girlfriend died shortly after by falling down a ravine, but the young boy somehow managed to keep himself together through this horrific tragedy and managed to make it to safety. He became an author and wrote about his harrowing tale in the novel :Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival."