Death-Defying Glass

In countless of movies, people in fight scenes are always falling through huge glass windows.

In the movie Bridget Jones' Diary, there was a scene exactly like that. Bridget's suitors, Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver (played by Colin Firth and Hugh Grant), got in a good old fashioned fight over her. They start fighting out in the street and of course somehow maneuvered into a restaurant filled with people. After a minute or so, they both manage to fall through the window and land stomach down on the pavement on all the shards of glass. But oddly enough, neither one are hurt that badly. A few scrapes on the face, but nothing to get too worried about.

http://public.fotki.com/dawnmescher/screencaps/bridget_joness_diary/bjd580.html

As the writers of the website of Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics say "There are individuals who have accidentally fallen through windows without sustaining serious injuries. There are also people who have survived the Ebola virus. However, in both cases the odds are not particularly good."

According to Bill Zalud in his online article Window Film's Capacity to Protect Glass about 150,000 accidents that happen in the United States every year. And these accidents usually happen as people walk through or into a pane of glass, not falling through the pane as Mark and Daniel did in the movie. It would be very hard to not be hit by the falling shards of glass while flying through a window.

So this would not be safe to do outside of a movie, unless of course the thought of losing a leg sounds like fun.