Surprisingly enough, people can fall from an airplane and survive. According to the guinness book of world records for the year 2000, the "longest fall survived without a parachute" was 33,330 feet.
Vesna Vulovic was a flight attendant aboard a DC-9 when it blew up over Srbska Kamenice, Czechoslovakia on Jan 26, 1972. She was lucky (or unlucky); the other 27 passengers were killed.