It said that the best way to survive a falling elevator is to lie down flat on the floor to distribute the impact evenly on your whole body.
Q. If I find myself in a free-falling elevator, is there any position that might increase my chance of survival? (Climbing on top of other people is not an acceptable answer.)
A. The best option would be to lie on your back on the floor as flat as possible, said Eliot H. Frank, a research engineer at the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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You might think that bracing yourself or bending your legs would help, but at high G-forces, your legs would simply not be able to support the weight of your body
A 2020 NPR article quotes a book that makes the same claim:
Here's an answer: It popped up in a footnote on the bottom of page 133 in Mary Roach's latest (and very charming) book, Packing for Mars.
[T]he best way to survive in a falling elevator is to lie down on your back. Sitting is bad but better than standing, because buttocks are nature's safety foam. Muscle and fat are compressible: they help absorb the G forces of the impact.
This How to Survive a Falling Elevator, According to Science video makes a similar claim.
There is a good point in the comments, that while in free-fall it would be difficult to lie down, so let's assume you lie down before the elevator starts falling.
Is this the best way to survive? Is it better to distribute the impact on your whole body, rather than for example standing up and trying to reduce the impact for your head?
To make the question clear, would you really have a higher change of surviving on impact when lying down versus standing up and bracing your legs?
