A 16-year-old is on the mend after falling 3,500 feet during a skydiving accident. 
 
 That first time jumper was 16 year old Mackenzie Wethington. 
 
 "Nobody survives that," said Holly Wethington, Makenzie's mother. 
 
 But Mackenzie is surviving. She’s in ICU right now, in and out of sleep, each time she's awake, remembering bits and pieces of her horrifying experience. But her father Joe Wethington remembers much more. 
 
 He says only half of the parachute opened as Mackenzie spiraled to the ground, 
 
 "The guy with the radio on the ground is trying to talk her out of what's going on and telling her what to do and she can’t do it," 
 
 "She's going too fast and in different directions she can’t reach up and grab it anyway and then when she goes into the spiral he keeps telling her to cut away to release the shoot and to pull the reserve." 
 
 But the owner of Pegasus Air Sports Center in Chickasha, Bob Swainson says the parachute opened completely. 
 
 "The jumper left the airplane. The parachute appeared to open ok. Soon after the opening the parachute started to rotate. There are a number of technical reasons why that could have happened possibly caused by the jumper herself. The jumper didn't sought out the rotation in accordance with the training she received earlier and contented to rotate to the ground and hurt herself," 
 
 Mackenzie hit the ground, a 3,500 feet fall. 
 
 "She would scream and arch her back and ask me to rub her back," Joe Wethington told NBC. 
 
 Paramedics soon arrived and Mackenzie was airlifted to OU medical center. 
 
 "It was like somebody has sit on my chest really an elephant and it did not come off until I got here....not knowing if she was going to be ok or not," Holly Wethington explained. 
 
 And doctors are telling the Wethingtons Mackenzie is going to survive. 
 
 "She's a miracle child, that she's doing well and she's going to be alright," Joe Wethington said. ||||| falls A lot of luck: How teen survived parachuting accident Jan. 28, 2014 at 7:32 PM ET 
 
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 When Texas teen Mackenzie Wethington survived a parachuting accident Saturday, her father Joe called the 16-year-old “a miracle.” Doctors who treat traumatic injuries aren’t disagreeing. 
 
 “Considering the bone and soft tissue damage that would occur from a fall from this height, the fact that she is alive and seemingly doing well really is quite miraculous, ’ said Dr. Michael Anderson, a pediatric critical care specialist at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland. 
 
 
 
 Wethington is one lucky teen. The trauma surgeon who first treated Mackenzie in the ER didn't expect her to survive. "I'm glad to be wrong about that," Dr. Jeffrey Bender of the University of Oklahoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City said Tuesday at a news conference. 
 
 Currently, Wethington is awake and breathing on her own and is listed in fair condition. “We see worse injuries routinely from car and ATV accidents,” said trauma surgeon Dr. Jason Lees, who is part of the Oklahoma team treating Wethington. “There’s a reason we wear parachutes when we step out of a plane.” 
 
 Amazingly, Wethington, who suffered a lacerated liver and kidney, broken teeth and multiple fractures throughout her body, is expected to fully recover within about six to eight weeks, Bender said Tuesday. Her injuries are "consistent with someone hit by a car going 40-50 mph," although that doesn't mean she hit the ground at that speed, he said. 
 
 According to the World Health Organization, falls are the second leading cause of accidental or unintentional injury deaths worldwide. Each year an estimated 424,000 individuals die from falls globally. And it doesn’t have to be a 3,500-foot mishap. 
 
 
 
 “A person can take a fall from a standing height and the neck can break, so this young girl is exceptionally fortunate in how the circumstances and force of the fall dissipated throughout her body,” said Dr. Ryan Goodwin, director of the Center for Pediatric and Adolescent Orthopedics at the Cleveland Clinic. “She is young, and in seeming good health, so she has that going for her.” But, he adds, she also had a lot of luck and physics on her side, too. 
 
 
 
 When an individual falls from a great height, survival often depends on a lot of luck, as well as air resistance, or drag. 
 
 “You can think of a fall as a form of energy,” explained James Kakalios, the Taylor Distinguished Professor in the school of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. “Basically, if a person steps out of a plane you have no velocity. Gravity will start to pull you down and you accelerate.” 
 
 
 
 But as you gain speed, air resistance comes into play and acts as a kind of brake slowing you down and reducing the amount of kinetic energy, or in other words, the force in which your body slams into the ground, said Kakalios, author of the Physics of Superheroes. 
 
 He thinks the teen may have done some things accidentally to increase air drag, slowing her fall, and leading to a potentially softer, yet still serious, landing. 
 
 “She’s creating a lot of turbulence as she falling, and therefore she’s maximizing the time it takes for her to hit the ground,” he said, citing that reducing the rate in which an object, or person, comes to a stop is critical for safety. “That’s why we have airbags,” Kakalios said, citing other instances of people surviving long falls such as I- 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis in which 13 people were killed, but 145 survived the 115-foot fall and the case of man who survived after he fell 500 feet from a New York skyscraper. 
 
 “It’s noteworthy that people don’t usually survive these things, but some people do in the right set of circumstances,” he said. “Many people buy lottery tickets and don’t win, but there’s always someone who does win.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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– An absolutely amazing story out of Oklahoma, where a Texas 16-year-old survived a 3,500-foot fall in a skydiving mishap—and didn't even require any surgery for her injuries. Mackenzie Wethington, who went skydiving Saturday as a birthday present from her parents, slammed into the ground, yet somehow only suffered a lacerated liver and kidney, broken bones, and a broken tooth; she's already communicating with her parents in writing and doctors say she's in good condition and should suffer few long-term effects. "I have no idea how she survived," one tells Today. Experts are calling it a miracle; one suspects the teen somehow decreased her air speed and thus landed somewhat more softly—in other words, she was incredibly lucky. The teen was supposed to do a tandem jump with an experienced skydiver, but was told when she arrived that Pegasus Air Sports Center wasn't doing tandem jumps, so her first jump after six hours of training was on her own—and went horribly awry. It's not clear exactly what happened: According to MyFox DFW, the family says Mackenzie's primary parachute didn't open properly (it was supposed to open automatically) and may have gotten tangled, and Mackenzie couldn't open the emergency chute. Mackenzie's dad (who says the main chute only half-opened, according to CNN) blames Pegasus Air Sports Center, claiming it offered inadequate training and didn't properly maintain its equipment. The owner of Pegasus, however, blames Mackenzie and denies any problem with her equipment: "She didn't do what she was supposed to do," he says, though it's not clear what she did wrong; the owner says she didn't take a "corrective counter action" to make her parachute "stop turning." He claims the chute did open fully but somehow, "maybe ... initiated by her," started a rotation that caused the problem. The family has hired a lawyer, Fox News Insider reports.