Lifetime’s ‘Pushed Off a Plane and Survived’ Isn’t Far-Fetched, These Real-Life Survival Stories Prove

When we talk about “taking the plunge,” we don’t mean what happens to Eva Marcille’s Jaynie in Lifetime’s Pushed Off a Plane and Survived, premiering Saturday, February 28, at 8/7c.

In a trailer for the TV movie, Jaynie meets and marries Cole (Tyler Lepley), a guy who seems like her perfect partner in life and in business. But Cole soon turns manipulative and even murderous. The trailer cuts out just before Jaynie’s near-fatal skydive, but the logline says she “falls 4,000 feet after her husband sabotages her parachute, only to survive and fight for justice.”

Lifetime claims the story is “ripped from the headlines” and “inspired by real stories,” and though the cable network isn’t specifying which headlines and which real stories, there are documented cases of people improbably surviving free falls of thousands of feet. Here’s a selection.

Victoria Cilliers

The most likely inspiration for Pushed Off a Plane and Survived is the case of Victoria Cilliers, who went on a skydiving trip with husband Emile Cilliers in 2015 and fell 4,000 feet after both her main parachute and her reserve chute failed. Victoria hit the ground at a reported 60 miles per hour but survived with a broken back, a broken pelvis, broken ribs, and minor internal injuries. It later emerged that Emile had tried to kill Victoria by cutting both chutes, and at a 2018 trial, he was sentenced to life in prison for attempted murder, according to The Independent.

Bear Grylls

Bear Grylls of Man vs. Wild and Running Wild fame also makes the list. In 1996, the British adventurer survived a Special Air Service training exercise-gone-wrong in Zambia as his parachute malfunctioned at 16,000 feet, according to BBC News. Grylls ended up landing on his parachute pack and fracturing three vertebrae. “I should have cut the main parachute and gone to the reserve but thought there was time to resolve the problem,” he later told the Daily Mail. “The doctor said I was a miracle man. I had come so close to severing my spinal cord. Because of my age and my fitness, they decided I could avoid surgery.”

Larisa Savitskaya

In 1981, Aeroflot Flight 811 collided in midair with a Tupolev Tu-16K strategic bomber over Amur Oblast in the Soviet Union, as El País reports. The force of the impact knocked passenger Larisa Savitskaya, returning from her honeymoon with her husband, into the aisle. She woke up, returned to her seat, and buckled her seatbelt, thinking of the survival story of Juliane Koepcke (detailed below), which she’d seen in the 1974 film Miracles Still Happen. After an eight-minute plummet, Savitskaya hit the ground in a fragment of the aircraft, with birch trees slowing her descent. Despite arm, rib, and spine fractures, the tragedy’s only survivor endured three days in the wilderness before getting rescued.

Vesna Vulović

Likewise, flight attendant Vesna Vulović was the only survivor of the 1972 bombing of JAT Yugoslav Airlines Flight 367. The explosion ripped the McDonnell Douglas DC-9 aircraft into three pieces, and Vulović, pinned by a food cart in the tail end of the fuselage, survived a fall of 33,333 feet. Her injuries included a fractured skull, two broken legs, three broken vertebrae, a fractured pelvis, broken ribs, and paralysis below the waist, though amazingly, she regained the ability to walk. In 1985, Paul McCartney presented Vulović with a certificate and a medal for setting the Guinness World Record for the highest fall survived without a parachute.

Juliane Koepcke

And 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke was the sole survivor of the 1971 crash of LANSA Flight 508 over the Amazon rainforest. Lightning had hit a fuel tank on the Lockheed Electra, and the plane’s right wing detached. Koepcke, still strapped to her seat, was sucked out of the falling plane. (“Suddenly there was this amazing silence. The plane was gone. I must have been unconscious and then came to in midair,” she later recalled to CNN. “I was flying, spinning through the air, and I could see the forest spinning beneath me.”) Hitting the ground two miles below, Koepcke broke her collarbone and suffered a concussion and gashes on her arms and legs, and she survived in the rainforest for 10 days before rescue.

Nicholas Alkemade

In 1944, Royal Air Force Sgt. Nicholas Alkemade was manning the tail-gun turret of a British bomber when German fire hit the plane. The ensuing inferno destroyed Alkemade’s parachute and threatened him, too, and he decided he’d rather jump than burn to death. He ended up surviving, though, with burns, a concussion, and a knee injury, since fir trees and dense underbrush broke his fall. “As I was falling through space, more than 18,000 feet above Germany, I felt a strange peace,” he said in an account archived by the International Bomber Command Centre. “The cool air rushed over my blistered face. I saw stars between my feet. I thought, ‘If this is dying, it’s nothing to be afraid of.’”

Alan Magee

U.S. Army Air Force Staff Sgt. Alan Magee was also a WWII turret gunner, manning a B-17 as one of the 360th Squadron members dispatched to bomb German torpedo stores in St. Nazaire, France, in 1943, per We Are the Mighty. Anti-aircraft gunfire hit the plane, and Magee was thrown into the air. He fell 20,000 feet and survived after crashing through the glass roof of a train station. “I owe the German military doctor who treated me a debt of gratitude,” he said, per the Hell’s Angels Newsletter. “He told me, ‘We are enemies, but I am first a doctor, and I will do my best to save your arm.’”

Ivan Chisov

In another WWII incident, Soviet Air Force lieutenant Ivan Chisov was trying to bomb German positions in 1942 when his plane when his Ilyushin Il-4 was hit. Chisov had a parachute but waited to deploy it — he thought the sight of the chute would attract enemy fire — and then lost consciousness. He hit the ground at 150 miles per hour, according to Yahoo! News UK, but the snowy ground helped cushion his fall, and he recovered from his broken pelvis and returned to flight three months later.

Pushed Off a Plane and Survived, Saturday, February 28, 8/7c, Lifetime