Wikipedia is a great starting point for going down rabbit holes.

I went to look something up the other day 鈥� I no longer remember what 鈥� and 20 minutes and an unknown number of links later I was reading about Nicholas Alkemade.

He was a fairly ordinary guy for most of his life. Born in Norfolk in the 1920s, he worked as a gardener, and then he joined the Royal Air Force. His bomber was shot down over Germany and he spent the last year of the Second World War as a POW. After the war he worked in a chemical plant, and then as a furniture salesman.

The thing is, the way he was shot down and taken prisoner was far from normal.

Alkemade was a tail gunner in the Avro Lancaster, one of the heavy four-engined bombers that were sent over to Germany and occupied Europe by night to bomb Nazi war industries.

On the night of March 24, 1944, their Lancaster, dubbed the Werewolf, dropped its bombs over Berlin and headed back to England, and safety. But strong winds pushed it off course, and it was spotted and ambushed by a German night fighter. The Lancaster caught fire. The pilot ordered everyone to bail out.

The thing about the tail gun compartment of a Lancaster, though, is that it鈥檚 cramped. Too cramped to fit both crewman and parachute.

So Alkemade opened the hatch to retrieve his parachute. It was on fire. The whole plane was on fire. His turret had shattered to pieces around him during the attack.

He had nowhere to go. He could stay and burn, or he could jump.

So he jumped. He fell approximately 18,000 feet, or just under 5,500 metres 鈥� five and a half kilometres 鈥� straight down.

He survived.

Alkemade had the incredible luck to fall into a grove of snow-covered pines. The snow and the tree branches broke his fall.

There are a surprising number of people who have survived falls from just as high up, or even higher.

Along with several other wartime survivors, there was Juliane Koepcke, a 17-year-old German girl who plunged into the Amazon jungle in 1971 when her plane broke up after a lightning strike.

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There was Vesna Vulovic, a Serbian flight attendant who fell the farthest 鈥� a full 33,000 feet (10,000 metres) when her plane was blown up by a bomb in 1972.

Although those survivors were incredibly lucky to live, they still had serious injuries.

Alkemade, on the other hand, had burns and cuts from the attack on his plane, but all the fall added to those wounds was a sprained knee.

He passed out about halfway through his 90-second fall. He had approximately 45 seconds to think about what was happening to him.

He later said that his main thought was regret at not getting home, but he didn鈥檛 describe the event with fear. He fell looking up, at the sky, rather than down towards the ground. Alkemade said it didn鈥檛 feel like he was moving at all.

鈥淚 felt suspended in space,鈥� he said, his fall earning him a space in history.