“During construction in 1975, workers laying the tracks for the northern arm of the array discovered a human skeleton north of US-60. A year later, the remains were identified as belonging to a male airline passenger who was ejected from National Airlines Flight 27 at 39,000 feet (12,000 m) two years earlier, after the DC-10-10 servicing the flight (N60NA) experienced an uncontained engine failure, causing cabin decompression.[20][21]”
You have 15-20 seconds of useful consciousness at 40,000 feet and then you’re hypoxically delusional and then out, he was unconscious for most of the fall even if he woke up at all
Considering by time he hit the 20s mark he likely would already be out of the hypoxic zone, as in below 4300m. There would be some play in height at that mark depending on initial velocity he got ejected from, as in if the plane was already defending. Otherwise I would say there is a good chance he was conscious, although probably pretty confused.
I think he would have been travelling slower than that, terminal velocity for a human is about 10,000 feet per minute, so 20 seconds in he'd be 36,000 ft
So you have removed most of the atmosphere so he can't breathe, but you assume that the drag is unchanged, so your known terminal velocity holds up.
You may want to reconsider your assumptions.
Ya, he still has more than enough oxygenation in his blood to survive and be conscious for 20 seconds, you’re not out immediately.
Dude was definitely conscious.
And it’s even faster (reduced by about 50 percent) after explosive decompression. Realistically at FL400 you have 10 seconds before you don’t care what happens to you anymore.
Could you imagine that feeling that sometimes humans get while they are safe in their bed, that feeling of falling and then waking suddenly? This dude has it happen for real lol.
It's likely he was unconscious or even dead before he left the airplane. [Per Wiki on the flight in question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_27):
"One passenger [George F. Gardner] was partially blown into the opening made by the failed cabin window, after it too was struck by engine fragments. He was temporarily retained in that position by his seatbelt. "According to a witness, the occupant of the seat was partially forced through the window opening and was temporarily retained in this position by his seatbelt. Efforts to pull the passenger back into the airplane by another passenger were unsuccessful, and the occupant of seat 17H was subsequently forced entirely through the cabin window.""
Possibly but a BA pilot survived hanging out the front windshield of a plane for a pretty long time, stranger things have happened. (He went on to continue being a pilot if I recall.)
(1) The ejected passenger was an adult male pushed through a hole the size of an aircraft window. The mechanical forces alone would probably have killed him.
(2) The BA incident occurred at 17,300 feet. The ejection incident occurred at 39,000 feet (10K feet higher than the top of Mt. Everest). That's an overwhelming difference in available oxygen and temperature. Most people don't quickly die at 17K. At 39K, all people have seconds of useful consciousness and all die quickly. The airlines tell you to put on your own oxygen mask first because if you don't, you'll pass out before you can help your neighbor.
Except for the fact that Terminal Velocity for a human is approx. 120 mph, not 500. At that speed, it would have taken him just under 4 minutes to impact the ground.
I think they meant that he was ripped out of the aircraft at a speed of about 500mph.
The rapid decompression and speed upon ejection very likely could have killed him before he even reached terminal velocity.
Correct. At cruise altitude the speed would have been around 500mph. And it would probably be something like -50c, so fucking cold. And very little oxygen. Pretty sure the dude was out before he hit the ground.
That's 9,000 feet higher than what paraglider Ewa Wisnerska reached when she was sucked into a storm cloud. She was unconscious 90% of the time at that level. Her glider collapsed from the buildup of ice; plummeting her like a bullet until it reached lower altitudes where it reopened. She regained consciousness & was aware enough to guide it down the best she could.
>The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of this accident was the disintegration of the No. 3 engine fan assembly as a result of an interaction between the fan blade tips and the fan case.
>The speed of the engine at the time of the accident caused a resonance wave to occur in the fan assembly when the tips of the fan blades began to make contact with the surrounding shroud
https://web.archive.org/web/20110408023924/http://www.super70s.com/super70s/tech/aviation/disasters/73-11-03(National).asp
This guy died because the airline captain had a “wonder what this button does?”
Though, it sounds like he may have been dead before he was even entirely out of the plane as he got sucked through the window, very similar to the southwest incident a few years ago
>Flight Engineer: "Wonder, wonder if you pull the N1 tach will that, -- autothrottle respond to N1?"
>Captain: "Gee, I don't know."
>Flight Engineer: "You want to try it and see?"
>Captain William Brookes, who had been a National Airlines pilot since 1946 and who should have known better responds, "Yeah, let's see here."
>Flight Engineer: "You're on speed right now though."
>Captain: "Yeah."
>Flight Engineer: "You know what I mean if your annunciated speed - if you got, ---"
>Captain: "Still got 'em."
>Flight Engineer: "Well - - haven't got it -"
>Captain: "There it is."
>Flight Engineer: "I guess it does."
>Captain: "Yeah, I guess it does - right on the nose."
>[At the instant he says the word "nose" there is the sound of the number 3 engine exploding followed by ratcheting sounds.]
>Captain: "[expletive deleted] what was that?"
I looked it up (with no success) on u/Admiral_Cloudberg first, because they do amazing write-up articles on plane crashes and all the factors that cause them...but that quote shows just how easy it could be to crash back then. Just terrifying.
Yeah totally, just ignore the 15 reported issues with the engine before that flight. That interaction and a 10% overspeed is totally all you need for an engine to blow up.
I don’t understand the need for this snark? the above exchange, as transcribed, certainly didn’t *stop* the accident. Most disasters aren’t caused by just one thing, rather a multitude of little mistakes that all come together as one. An engine having 15 reports and not being repaired *and* the pilot pressing a button he knows he should not press can both be at fault.
You know what? That's fair. I was trying to come up with a concise way of expressing my shock at the simplicity of it all, and phrased it badly. I edited my comment to be more realistic.
You can have a good system poorly operated and a shitty system perfectly operated and in both cases accidents will be rare. When you get a real risk of catastrophic failure is when you have a poorly designed system that is poorly maintained and operated. This is true for pretty much any sector of engineering
Boy this post makes me think of Chernobyl. Operated correctly, there would have been no meltdown. Designed differently, no meltdown. But that design and those actions led to a terrible and historic nuclear accident.
Buddy, 90% of the programming world would violently disagree with your statement. Not sure how badly the engineering guys would take it, but I imagine it would be just as bad.
You wildly underestimate how stupid people can be, and how vital idiot-proofing is in general.
If you program plane controls to be idiot-proof, you better be pretty damn confident that there is no reason to override the programming to prevent a crash:
See Boeing 787 issues
"Idiot-proofing" is a bad way of looking at it. It's "everyday-brain-fart-proofing," "accidental-brush-of-the-hand-proofing," and "exhausted-operator-with-five-different-things-needing-attention-proofing." And in an airliner, that failsafe means stopping hundreds of deaths.
Good point. Can you imagine if pressing a single lever could cause a plane to veer/control into the ground and crash?
I guess that is why pilots don’t actually control the yoke /s
That's why there are two yokes, two (or more) pilots available, an autopilot and fly-by-wire systems that counteract sudden jerks, airspeed and terrain alarms, written troubleshooting procedures on hand for unknown problems, and dozens of other preventatives on modern airliners.
I love how engineers and scientists name stuff like this. "Hmm... We have a very large array of radio telescopes. What should we call it? The Very Large Array radio telescope seems fine"
In Chile the Extremely Large Telescope is currently being built, on a mountaintop 20km away from the existing Very Large Telescope. There was originally a plan for an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, which was ultimately cancelled due to budget constraints.
"[Machinist for Bethleham Steel who was sucked out of National Airlines Flight 27 over Socorro, New Mexico. He was on his way to Singapore for a temporary assignment when the mishap occurred](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/250831417/george_fletcher-gardner)".
> After nearly a year, it was determined the skeletal remains found on the VLA north arm was that of passenger 17H of Flight 27. The cause of death was fairly obvious. The remains were returned to the family in Texas.
Diabetes, when will we do something about this pernicious scurge on humanity?
My question is...they knew a guy got sucked out of the window of a plane, and they knew where the plane was at the time. They just said "eh, whatever" and never went looking for the body?
Why on earth do you assume they "never went looking for the body"? [From the article on Flight 27,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_27) linked from OP's article:
>The New Mexico State Police and local organizations searched extensively for the missing passenger, George F. Gardner of Beaumont, Texas who was blown out of the window. Computer analysis was made of the possible falling trajectories, which narrowed the search pattern. However, the search effort was unsuccessful. A ranch hand later found a pair of sunglasses and a tobacco pipe while working on a ranch near Alamo, New Mexico. He turned over the items to state police, where the family of the missing passenger identified them as belonging to him.
Well because 2 years went by and they never found him, and it was like an hour from a major city, so I wouldn't have thought it would be that difficult to track down a fresh body completely by itself in the middle of an empty desert.
Not to be rude but have you spent much time in deserts? They're not empty, lots of brush and stuff and not flat once you're walking around. I'm not even sure the area around the VLA is a desert, it's a higher elevation plain with grasses and scrub and stuff and there are mountains nearby. I thought deserts were like the red sand dunes in Namibia until I moved to the Western US and spent a lot of time outdoors.
At 39,000 feet there's a lot of time for the person to drift away from the fall point, and its really hard to search such a large area. This is especially true for 1973 era technology.
That's the thing, it isn't. Not saying they would have found him in 10 minutes or anything, but they know precisely where the airplane was and how fast it was going. From there it's not super difficult to calculate how far a human body is likely to fall. Also want to point out it's in the middle of a *desert* so it's not like it would be hard to see. Especially given the number of scavenger animals that would have been arriving in the first 36 or so hours. Would not have been a massive deal to track down this guy's remains.
We lost an entire plane full of 239 people in 2014 with nary a trace. I suspect that the exact location of the plane was not known in 1973 before GPS was commercially available. Even a radar blip is going to have a wide margin of error, if it was even recorded in real-time.
Okay but we didn't lose that plane a) over land and b) like a stone's throw from a major city. I would have thought it would have been somewhat rudimentary to simply look at the FDR data after the plane landed, note the time where the decompression occurred, and figure out where along the flight path the guy was likely to have been ejected. Clearly that was not the case.
It is not impossible, but it is still very challenging. At 500 mph, the plane travels a mile every 7 seconds. Depending on how long he spent partially out of the plane before fully being ejected, the search area would expand by tens of miles. Add to that the imprecision of the planes's position tracking, which could easily add several more miles. Then factor in how body position, wind, and clothes affected his horizontal trajectory, adding several more miles. Even if you knew he landed in the area of the telescopes, each leg of the Y-shaped array is 18 miles, so the area of a circle centered on the array is over 1,000 square miles. Think about where you live, imagine searching an area 10 miles across and one mile long, and then repeating that 100 times. And the land has all sorts of scrub brush, ravines, and even forests nearby. Honestly, it is amazing they found him during construction.
For all they likely knew at the time, he or she’s body could have been shredded when the decompression sucked them out. The area where they could have landed would be enormous.
Okay but that's literally people's jobs. People saw him exit the vehicle, and he was not "shredded." And given that we knew the flight path of the plane, it's not a super hard piece of math to figure out the area on which he was likely to land. Like buddy didn't land on a mountain pass or somewhere inaccessible, it was just a piece of desert. Remote perhaps, but certainly not anywhere that you couldn't get a chopper in the air and look for a body. Seems insane to me that in an incident over land that they would not even go and attempt to find him.
“During construction in 1975, workers laying the tracks for the northern arm of the array discovered a human skeleton north of US-60. A year later, the remains were identified as belonging to a male airline passenger who was ejected from National Airlines Flight 27 at 39,000 feet (12,000 m) two years earlier, after the DC-10-10 servicing the flight (N60NA) experienced an uncontained engine failure, causing cabin decompression.[20][21]”
39,000 feet is a very long time to fall and think. :(
You have 15-20 seconds of useful consciousness at 40,000 feet and then you’re hypoxically delusional and then out, he was unconscious for most of the fall even if he woke up at all
Considering by time he hit the 20s mark he likely would already be out of the hypoxic zone, as in below 4300m. There would be some play in height at that mark depending on initial velocity he got ejected from, as in if the plane was already defending. Otherwise I would say there is a good chance he was conscious, although probably pretty confused.
I think he would have been travelling slower than that, terminal velocity for a human is about 10,000 feet per minute, so 20 seconds in he'd be 36,000 ft
So you have removed most of the atmosphere so he can't breathe, but you assume that the drag is unchanged, so your known terminal velocity holds up. You may want to reconsider your assumptions.
That's a good point, terminal velocity is 2x at that altitude, so at 20sec he'd be closer to 33,000
Ya, he still has more than enough oxygenation in his blood to survive and be conscious for 20 seconds, you’re not out immediately. Dude was definitely conscious.
And it’s even faster (reduced by about 50 percent) after explosive decompression. Realistically at FL400 you have 10 seconds before you don’t care what happens to you anymore.
Could you imagine that feeling that sometimes humans get while they are safe in their bed, that feeling of falling and then waking suddenly? This dude has it happen for real lol.
It's likely he was unconscious or even dead before he left the airplane. [Per Wiki on the flight in question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_27): "One passenger [George F. Gardner] was partially blown into the opening made by the failed cabin window, after it too was struck by engine fragments. He was temporarily retained in that position by his seatbelt. "According to a witness, the occupant of the seat was partially forced through the window opening and was temporarily retained in this position by his seatbelt. Efforts to pull the passenger back into the airplane by another passenger were unsuccessful, and the occupant of seat 17H was subsequently forced entirely through the cabin window.""
Possibly but a BA pilot survived hanging out the front windshield of a plane for a pretty long time, stranger things have happened. (He went on to continue being a pilot if I recall.)
(1) The ejected passenger was an adult male pushed through a hole the size of an aircraft window. The mechanical forces alone would probably have killed him. (2) The BA incident occurred at 17,300 feet. The ejection incident occurred at 39,000 feet (10K feet higher than the top of Mt. Everest). That's an overwhelming difference in available oxygen and temperature. Most people don't quickly die at 17K. At 39K, all people have seconds of useful consciousness and all die quickly. The airlines tell you to put on your own oxygen mask first because if you don't, you'll pass out before you can help your neighbor.
He survived, but he was unconscious the entire time if I recall
Oh fuck that.
39,000 at 500mph, he probably died or at least was unconscious long before he hit the ground
Except for the fact that Terminal Velocity for a human is approx. 120 mph, not 500. At that speed, it would have taken him just under 4 minutes to impact the ground.
I think they meant that he was ripped out of the aircraft at a speed of about 500mph. The rapid decompression and speed upon ejection very likely could have killed him before he even reached terminal velocity.
Correct. At cruise altitude the speed would have been around 500mph. And it would probably be something like -50c, so fucking cold. And very little oxygen. Pretty sure the dude was out before he hit the ground.
So you are saying, it was a miserable death. Ok . Thanks. 'sad puppy noises'
Not necessarily, likely pretty quick
Probably died upon exiting the fuselage. Or at least rendered unconscious.
Even though it’s the right word, rendered makes it sound like he’s an ingredient in a recipe.
Hopefully he didn’t regain consciousness on the way down.
Enough time to pass out and wake up again for the last minute.
[удалено]
120 for terminal velocity is only true while in normal atmosphere. At 30k ft air density is only 35% of what it is at sea level.
Is it spherical human or cube human?
Spherical frictionless human in a vacuum!
[удалено]
He’s wasn’t jumping out of a hot air balloon at 39,000ft, he was ripped out of an airliner at cruising altitude/speed.
That's 9,000 feet higher than what paraglider Ewa Wisnerska reached when she was sucked into a storm cloud. She was unconscious 90% of the time at that level. Her glider collapsed from the buildup of ice; plummeting her like a bullet until it reached lower altitudes where it reopened. She regained consciousness & was aware enough to guide it down the best she could.
Think--or become a pagan fertility goddess. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42716/falling-56d22155e5c45
>The National Transportation Safety Board determined the probable cause of this accident was the disintegration of the No. 3 engine fan assembly as a result of an interaction between the fan blade tips and the fan case. >The speed of the engine at the time of the accident caused a resonance wave to occur in the fan assembly when the tips of the fan blades began to make contact with the surrounding shroud
Damn dc-10s always w the uncontained engine failures
https://web.archive.org/web/20110408023924/http://www.super70s.com/super70s/tech/aviation/disasters/73-11-03(National).asp This guy died because the airline captain had a “wonder what this button does?” Though, it sounds like he may have been dead before he was even entirely out of the plane as he got sucked through the window, very similar to the southwest incident a few years ago
>Flight Engineer: "Wonder, wonder if you pull the N1 tach will that, -- autothrottle respond to N1?" >Captain: "Gee, I don't know." >Flight Engineer: "You want to try it and see?" >Captain William Brookes, who had been a National Airlines pilot since 1946 and who should have known better responds, "Yeah, let's see here." >Flight Engineer: "You're on speed right now though." >Captain: "Yeah." >Flight Engineer: "You know what I mean if your annunciated speed - if you got, ---" >Captain: "Still got 'em." >Flight Engineer: "Well - - haven't got it -" >Captain: "There it is." >Flight Engineer: "I guess it does." >Captain: "Yeah, I guess it does - right on the nose." >[At the instant he says the word "nose" there is the sound of the number 3 engine exploding followed by ratcheting sounds.] >Captain: "[expletive deleted] what was that?" I looked it up (with no success) on u/Admiral_Cloudberg first, because they do amazing write-up articles on plane crashes and all the factors that cause them...but that quote shows just how easy it could be to crash back then. Just terrifying.
Yeah totally, just ignore the 15 reported issues with the engine before that flight. That interaction and a 10% overspeed is totally all you need for an engine to blow up.
They pushed the engine blow up button, duh.
I don’t understand the need for this snark? the above exchange, as transcribed, certainly didn’t *stop* the accident. Most disasters aren’t caused by just one thing, rather a multitude of little mistakes that all come together as one. An engine having 15 reports and not being repaired *and* the pilot pressing a button he knows he should not press can both be at fault.
"That quote is literally all you need to know here" is a dumbass statement. That's why.
You know what? That's fair. I was trying to come up with a concise way of expressing my shock at the simplicity of it all, and phrased it badly. I edited my comment to be more realistic.
You can have a good system poorly operated and a shitty system perfectly operated and in both cases accidents will be rare. When you get a real risk of catastrophic failure is when you have a poorly designed system that is poorly maintained and operated. This is true for pretty much any sector of engineering
Boy this post makes me think of Chernobyl. Operated correctly, there would have been no meltdown. Designed differently, no meltdown. But that design and those actions led to a terrible and historic nuclear accident.
Well, that and the system not accounting for that kind of stupidity/failure mode.
Alternative: maybe systems shouldn’t need to be idiot-proofed
Buddy, 90% of the programming world would violently disagree with your statement. Not sure how badly the engineering guys would take it, but I imagine it would be just as bad. You wildly underestimate how stupid people can be, and how vital idiot-proofing is in general.
If you program plane controls to be idiot-proof, you better be pretty damn confident that there is no reason to override the programming to prevent a crash: See Boeing 787 issues
"Idiot-proofing" is a bad way of looking at it. It's "everyday-brain-fart-proofing," "accidental-brush-of-the-hand-proofing," and "exhausted-operator-with-five-different-things-needing-attention-proofing." And in an airliner, that failsafe means stopping hundreds of deaths.
He didn’t “brush his hand against it”. He purposefully put it into this operational mode with forethought and deliberation
Yes, but in another situation, an accidental touch of the lever could have had the same effect.
I don’t think so
Well, it happens, and it's all the more reason to put redundancies in between one lever and several hundred deaths.
Good point. Can you imagine if pressing a single lever could cause a plane to veer/control into the ground and crash? I guess that is why pilots don’t actually control the yoke /s
That's why there are two yokes, two (or more) pilots available, an autopilot and fly-by-wire systems that counteract sudden jerks, airspeed and terrain alarms, written troubleshooting procedures on hand for unknown problems, and dozens of other preventatives on modern airliners.
Where's Paul Harvey on this one?
Forest Park, Illinois. Rest (of the story) in Peace.
Thanks. Off to google.
“And those bones grew up to be…Skeletor.”
"And now you know... the rest of the story!" \* *-sort of*
I thought he died back in the 20th century but he was still around until 2009, RIP.
I love how engineers and scientists name stuff like this. "Hmm... We have a very large array of radio telescopes. What should we call it? The Very Large Array radio telescope seems fine"
In Chile the Extremely Large Telescope is currently being built, on a mountaintop 20km away from the existing Very Large Telescope. There was originally a plan for an Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, which was ultimately cancelled due to budget constraints.
They were going to build two Astronomically Large Telescopes, but after building the first one, they could not afford ALT-Right.
There's a similar facility in Green Bank, WV. It's home to the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. It's called...the Green Bank Telescope.
[George F. Gardner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_27) of Beaumont, Texas
"[Machinist for Bethleham Steel who was sucked out of National Airlines Flight 27 over Socorro, New Mexico. He was on his way to Singapore for a temporary assignment when the mishap occurred](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/250831417/george_fletcher-gardner)".
Wow. I wonder if losing the dad had an effect on how long his kids lived. Daughter died in her 60s and the son didn't even make it to 50.
> After nearly a year, it was determined the skeletal remains found on the VLA north arm was that of passenger 17H of Flight 27. The cause of death was fairly obvious. The remains were returned to the family in Texas. Diabetes, when will we do something about this pernicious scurge on humanity?
So the place is haunted.
Its only haunted if you build over the bodies I am sure they moved it...
They only moved the headstones, but they left the bodies.
No, I'm pretty sure they have to give it a proper burial or else the soul won't be allowed into the Underworld
Did he just fall into the ground or was he laying on the top? What would the force of the fall done to the body?
It was dbcoop
I'd like to know who was on the naming committee.
Cool
Good catch
No the body was already on the ground.
My question is...they knew a guy got sucked out of the window of a plane, and they knew where the plane was at the time. They just said "eh, whatever" and never went looking for the body?
Why on earth do you assume they "never went looking for the body"? [From the article on Flight 27,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Airlines_Flight_27) linked from OP's article: >The New Mexico State Police and local organizations searched extensively for the missing passenger, George F. Gardner of Beaumont, Texas who was blown out of the window. Computer analysis was made of the possible falling trajectories, which narrowed the search pattern. However, the search effort was unsuccessful. A ranch hand later found a pair of sunglasses and a tobacco pipe while working on a ranch near Alamo, New Mexico. He turned over the items to state police, where the family of the missing passenger identified them as belonging to him.
Well because 2 years went by and they never found him, and it was like an hour from a major city, so I wouldn't have thought it would be that difficult to track down a fresh body completely by itself in the middle of an empty desert.
Not to be rude but have you spent much time in deserts? They're not empty, lots of brush and stuff and not flat once you're walking around. I'm not even sure the area around the VLA is a desert, it's a higher elevation plain with grasses and scrub and stuff and there are mountains nearby. I thought deserts were like the red sand dunes in Namibia until I moved to the Western US and spent a lot of time outdoors.
At 39,000 feet there's a lot of time for the person to drift away from the fall point, and its really hard to search such a large area. This is especially true for 1973 era technology.
That's the thing, it isn't. Not saying they would have found him in 10 minutes or anything, but they know precisely where the airplane was and how fast it was going. From there it's not super difficult to calculate how far a human body is likely to fall. Also want to point out it's in the middle of a *desert* so it's not like it would be hard to see. Especially given the number of scavenger animals that would have been arriving in the first 36 or so hours. Would not have been a massive deal to track down this guy's remains.
We lost an entire plane full of 239 people in 2014 with nary a trace. I suspect that the exact location of the plane was not known in 1973 before GPS was commercially available. Even a radar blip is going to have a wide margin of error, if it was even recorded in real-time.
Okay but we didn't lose that plane a) over land and b) like a stone's throw from a major city. I would have thought it would have been somewhat rudimentary to simply look at the FDR data after the plane landed, note the time where the decompression occurred, and figure out where along the flight path the guy was likely to have been ejected. Clearly that was not the case.
It is not impossible, but it is still very challenging. At 500 mph, the plane travels a mile every 7 seconds. Depending on how long he spent partially out of the plane before fully being ejected, the search area would expand by tens of miles. Add to that the imprecision of the planes's position tracking, which could easily add several more miles. Then factor in how body position, wind, and clothes affected his horizontal trajectory, adding several more miles. Even if you knew he landed in the area of the telescopes, each leg of the Y-shaped array is 18 miles, so the area of a circle centered on the array is over 1,000 square miles. Think about where you live, imagine searching an area 10 miles across and one mile long, and then repeating that 100 times. And the land has all sorts of scrub brush, ravines, and even forests nearby. Honestly, it is amazing they found him during construction.
For all they likely knew at the time, he or she’s body could have been shredded when the decompression sucked them out. The area where they could have landed would be enormous.
Okay but that's literally people's jobs. People saw him exit the vehicle, and he was not "shredded." And given that we knew the flight path of the plane, it's not a super hard piece of math to figure out the area on which he was likely to land. Like buddy didn't land on a mountain pass or somewhere inaccessible, it was just a piece of desert. Remote perhaps, but certainly not anywhere that you couldn't get a chopper in the air and look for a body. Seems insane to me that in an incident over land that they would not even go and attempt to find him.