A WOMAN parasailer was left floating in the air for almost an hour before plummeting to the ground after the rope attaching her to the boat snapped. 
 
 Katie Malone was supposed to be in the air for 10-minutes in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico when the cord attaching her to the boat suddenly snapped. 
 
 ABC 4 Katie Malone was badly injured in a horrifying parasailing accident in Mexico 
 
 The 29-year-old, from San Diego, California, was stuck in the air for 45 minutes during a storm before falling hundreds of feet. 
 
 Her dad said Katie’s last words before she passed out were: “Please don't let me die, please don't let me be paralysed”. 
 
 Then she smashed into an airport. 
 
 Miraculously she survived the crash, but the suffered a series of agonising injuries. 
 
 ABC 4 Katie was celebrating her 29th birthday when the cord snapped leaving her being tossed in the air for an hour 
 
 Katie fractured her pelvis, skull, jaw, cheek and four ribs and suffered a collapsed lung. 
 
 She also suffered serious head trauma and with surgeons having to put in 14 screws and titanium mesh in her head. 
 
 Her dad Kelly told KSWB: “It's one of those calls you never want to take and of course you're thinking the worst.” 
 
 He flew Mexico to see his daughter and couldn't believe the contrast to the smiling girl he had seen in vacation pictures she had texted him just days before. 
 
 Although Katie was overcoming some obstacles, things turned dire when her pituitary gland - found at the base of the brain - swelled to 10 times its normal size. 
 
 Facebook 4 Katie fractured her pelvis, skull, jaw, cheek and four ribs and suffered a collapsed lung. 
 
 Her brother Brendan made a video from her hospital bed, pleading for help so that she could be flown home for treatment back in the US. 
 
 He said: “Her pituitary gland won't stop swelling, it's sending false messages to her kidney with certain degrees of this, it becomes life-threatening. 
 
 “Doctors here at the hospital feel they've done the best they can, but unfortunately the type of medical attention she needs is in the United States.” 
 
 ABC 4 Earlier snaps showed her enjoying her trip to Mexico before the horrifying accident 
 
 Since Katie did not have travel insurance, a GoFundMe campaign raised money for her initial operations. 
 
 But it was not enough to cover the costs of an air ambulance back to California which prompted former California politician Duncan L Hunter and his son, current California congressman Duncan D Hunter to step in. 
 
 Hunter Sr contacted the Mexican embassy and sent a personal guarantee to Life Flight for the air ambulance. 
 
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 He said several other groups also helped pay for the flight and hundreds have since donated to pay for Katie's hospital bills. 
 
 After Katie landed back in California, she was transferred to UC San Diego Medical Centre in an ambulance. 
 
 Cops in Mexico are investigating the parasailing company behind the horrific crash. ||||| Celaida Lissabet, 16, pats her mother Raquel Lissabet on the head as she wipes tears while describing how her daughter suffered brain damage from an inflatable sumo suit. The family is suing Mater Academy and a party rental company after the girl was injured during a school event. 
 
 During a Hialeah Gardens school Spirit Day, a teen girl dressed in an inflatable sumo wrestler suit for what was supposed to be a goofy match with a classmate. 
 
 But a lawsuit claims the sumo fun went horribly wrong, leaving the teen with severe brain damage after her head repeatedly struck the floor. 
 
 The girl, 15-year-old freshman Celaida Lissabet, and her mother late last week sued charter school Mater Academy and Mega Party Events, the company that supplied the inflatable suits, which the lawsuit contends are designed for use in violent recreational sumo wrestling games. 
 
 Adrian De La Rosa, owner of Mega Party Events, said the girl was outfitted according to instructions from the suits manufacturer. 
 
 The suit is fairly safe. Weve never had an injury like this, De La Rosa said. I really hope she is doing OK. 
 
 The Lissabets allege the school and company failed to ensure her helmet fit properly during the event last October. She was later rushed to the hospital after complaining of blurred vision, dizziness, nausea and headaches, according to to the negligence lawsuit filed by Davie attorney Lance Rudzinski. 
 
 The once-vibrant ninth-grader can no longer communicate properly and exhibits child-like behavior, Rudzinski said. 
 
 Now, she sits in her room at night, in the darkness and doesnt talk to anyone, he said. She has severe anxiety. Its a complete 180-degree turn for her and her family. Its really tragic. 
 
 Wrestling in inflatable sumo body suits is a party activity loosely fashioned after the ancient Japanese sport in which hefty wrestlers compete to push each other out of a circular ring. 
 
 In the American game, the match is conducted on a protective mat ring. But Celaida fell backward, hitting her head three times against the ground outside the mat, according to her attorneys. 
 
 The lawsuit was filed against Mater Academy, 7901 NW 103rd St., and West Kendalls Mega Party. The lawsuit alleges the company knew from prior similar incidents that participants faced serious injury. 
 
 A representative for Mater Academy said she could not immediately comment because the school had not been served the lawsuit, and the principal was out of town. 
 
 De La Rosa of Mega Party Events said the companys insurance carrier is exploring whether the girl had suffered the head injury prior to the October event. 
 
 Its not the first lawsuit involving the inflatable sumo game. 
 
 The most prominent: In 2007, Colorado woman sued the makers of an inflatable sumo suit after she fell and suffered severe brain damage during a company retreat. Jurors awarded her $2 million in damages. ||||| Editor's note: This article was first published at 3:30 p.m. on April 14 and has been updated. 
 
 One sailor remains hospitalized and three others are in recovery after an arresting cable snapped during a carrier landing in a rare and terrifying flight deck mishap on March 18. 
 
 Sailors on the carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower's flight deck saw the landing go horribly wrong in an instant that Friday afternoon. An E-2C Hawkeye snagged the metal cable stretched across the deck. But the plane didn't slow, instead careening down the runaway and plunging over the edge, according to a squadron member who has spoken to eyewitnesses and those injured. 
 
 Behind it, the cable came unhooked from the port side and whipped around toward the superstructure, striking eight members of Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron 123. 
 
 after the carrier Dwight D. Einsenhower's arresting cable snapped, injuring eight sailors on the flight deck off the coast of Virginia, according to a source familiar with the squadron whose plane was trying to land when the accident occurred. 
 
 Their injuries range from cuts and bruises to a skull fracture and broken bones, according to the squadron member, who asked not to be identified amid an ongoing investigation. 
 
 It had been more than 10 years since an arresting cable, a thick rope of wires that catches an aircraft's tail hook to slow it down and complete a carrier landing, has parted on a carrier deck, according to Naval Air Force Atlantic spokesman Cmdr. Mike Kafka. 
 
 One maintainer is still at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, Kafka confirmed. 
 
 The sailor was treated for a severed blood vessel that nearly resulted in a foot amputation, the VAW-123 member said. He was scheduled to go home April 7 , he added, but has had to stay to treat an infected skin graft. 
 
 He is the last of four flown off the ship and treated either at Sentara or Naval Medical Center Portsmouth on March 18. Their injuries included a fractured skull, broken arms, legs and ankles, and dislocated hips. The rest were treated on the ship, according to a Navy release. 
 
 On Friday, a day after this story posted, an image of a cranial reportedly smashed in the March 18 cable accident was to uploaded to photo site imgur with the note, "This cranial saved a shipmate's life during the incident onboard the USS Eisenhower on March 18. Never forgo safety. Ever." 
 
 Close call 
 
 The plane made it back to Naval Station Norfolk undamaged, but not without surviving a harrowing near-miss. The pilots said that rather than the arresting gear slowing them down, they hit the cable all at once . The Hawkeye went nose-down off the bow, but had enough momentum to pull up before hitting the water. 
 
 "It came back, but it had friggin' salt water on the bottom of it, it was that close," the sailor said. "The pilots were all shaken up," he said. "One of them, you could tell it messed him up, because they thought they were going to die." 
 
 Ike resumed flight operations two days later, and a week after the incident, only one sailor was still in the hospital. 
 
 In the meantime, the VAW-123 member said, the chain of command has been providing updates on the guys' conditions and visiting the hospitalized sailor. 
 
 "There's no brain damage as far as I know, but they're both looking at medical retirement, I bet," he said of two of the squadron members who'd been hospitalized. "The other two, I can't imagine how long rehab's going to be for two broken ankles, and the other guy with rods and pins in his legs."
– Kids have a word for it when you land face-first: "fail." As an Internet meme, it's called faceplanting. But what really happens when people use their face for brakes? At BoingBoing, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the physical results—which aren't pretty—and takes a glimpse at the related field of injury biomechanics. She starts with a paper by a mechanical engineer about a classic faceplant: young man tries to ride bike along a board from shoreline to dock, misses board, lands face-first. (See the video here.) He endured Le Fort II and III fractures, his face cracking in a triangle shape starting at the top of the nose and going down both sides to the upper jaw. Sadly, other researchers say this particular video won't advance the field because the frame-rate is poor; real experiments analyze the 10-20 milliseconds in which injuries occur. So Koerth-Baker delves deeper into injury biomechanics, starting with John Stapp, an Air Force flight surgeon who endured a sudden stop in a rocket sled at 46.2 g's of force in 1954. He broke nearly all the capillaries in his eyes, Ejection Site reports, but his work helped the Air Force design pilot ejector-seats. More recently, studies on NFL concussions have shown that hits from the side or back cause more concussions than hits on the crown of the helmet. Which leaves faceplanters where, exactly? Well, getting seriously injured as we laugh and learn. At least this one, at SBNation, faceplanted on purpose in an effort to help his team. (Click to check out some less painful memes.)