Should You Find Yourself Plummeting

Whenever a plane I'm on is close enough to its destination that houses and cars appear, I can't help thinking to myself: "If I fell from here, could I survive?" There is something about having a visual sense of the ground that makes a parachute-less airplane jump seem survivable. If those motor vehicles can zip along the highways below with such silent smoothness, surely I could manage to flutter to Earth like a feather.

It's all a ridiculous illusion, of course, as the vast majority of...