Captain America Falling

[Infornific]

Just saw an extended promo clip for the new Captain America movie. It opens with Captain America jumping out of a plane without a parachute and doing a dive into the water by a ship. He survives because he's the gosh darn Captain America but it got me thinking just how superhumanly durable you'd need to be to succeed at such an attempt.

I could try to precisely calculate GURPS mechanics for this but instead I'm going to cheat a little. I'll use high diving champions as a comparison. Male competitive high divers jump from about 89 feet up and hit the water at about 90 kph or 55 mph (See this Reuters story for details.) Wikipedia reports higher dives for record jumps but a lot of those report significant injuries as well. Cap's supposed to get on a boat and beat up some mercenaries right after the dive so he needs to be relatively intact and not just survive. Anyway, this suggests a baseline for what is doable. Since Captain America has (in GURPS terms) a ridiculously high DX we'll assume he has skill comparable to a world class high diver. But how fast would he be hitting the water?

If wikipedia can be trusted, terminal velocity for a human is about 120 mph in bell flop position and up to 200 mph for a more streamlined position. Cap starts his fall in belly flop position but ends in a feet first dive. So he probably hits the water going faster that 120 mph but if he changes position at the last moment would hit at less than 200 mph. So he's hitting the water moving at a minimum more than twice as fast as a world class high diver and possibly close to four times as fast. Since damage in GURPS scales directly with speed, Cap would need four times the hit points (with the Massless modification) or Injury Tolerance (Damage Reduction) 4 to deal with the fall about as well as a real world high diver does with his dive. I'd round it up to Injury Tolerance (Damage Reduction) 5 to give a margin of error. Just in case anyone wants to stat up the Marvel movie superheroes.