Part of a leg - the foot and the calf floating on the surface. Every imaginable configuration."But it was not only rescuers who were out on the burning sea that night. As a group of coastguards hauled a corpse from the water, a snappily dressed blonde pulled alongside in a boat and pointed a boom-microphone at them. The rest he referred to as "damaged" or "very damaged"."We recovered some people that were in half at the torso, people that were missing limbs, or a part of their heads We recovered limbs alone. Most of the bodies recovered that first night, almost two thirds of them, were women. Their breasts act as flotation devices and they tend to have more body fat.To describe the bodies Vincent resorted to the neutral language of a police report Those in good condition he called "intact". The victims showed up as a distortion on the surface of the water Sometimes, the distortion turned out to be debris More often than not it was a body.

As well as the piles of floating debris, there were so many bodies, and parts of bodies, that he had to cut Romeo's speed to just five knots to avoid snagging them with the propeller. Hitting the water at 100mph, from 13,000ft, is like hitting a concrete floor (drivers knocked out of racing boats travelling at 150mph rarely survive) Death is immediate, and traumatic Limbs are severed Clothes burst open and are stripped off. Which is why nearly all the victims Vincent recovered on that first night were naked.He Was in charge of steering the boat. The most we can hope is that the immense G-forces exerted on them as they spun through the air may have rendered them unconscious.To imagine what happens when a person hits the water from that height, you only have to remember one of those school swimming galas when, to give the occasion a jolt of humour, the lifeguards would dress up in baggy clothes, stuff a pillow down their fronts, and do a bellyflop off the high board. Some passengers will have been killed instantaneously by the explosion.

Many, if not most, of the passengers were still alive as the plane fell from the sky. Anyone who has been on the Tower of Terror at Disneyworld knows what a gut-wrenching, heart-stopping feeling it is to freefall even 40 feet. We know this because the track of debris strewn along the flight path was nearly 20 miles long. An object falling from the sky travels at between 100mph and 150mph.