Still, it's injured, not dead. Both impact speed and crush length are likely quite a bit higher than your assumption; however, this is not a horrible thing. Race car drivers survive going into the wall at 100 m/s on a fairly regular basis, generally eyeballs out, with a meter or two of crush length.
Only with a pretty oblique impact though- a head-on impact with the wall is 500g which is not survivable. Usually before the impact the car skids, brakes or turns sideways which can slow the car a very great deal- even just lifting your foot off the accelerator at 200 mph gives more than 1g deceleration just from air drag; so the perpendicular impact speed is usually a lot lower than it looks.
In the case of a VTVL falling straight down at terminal velocity, that acceleration can easily be taken the same way the liftoff acceleration is -- on the back, legs up, in a cushion couch.
Terminal velocity is typically around ~200mph, but depends on the drag factor. Vertical impact with the ground is not survivable without a considerable crush zone (for example 10m crush zone from 80m/s gives an average of 16g for 1/4 of a second, which is probably quite survivable)
IRC Rotons crush technique only worked if the landing rotor deployed normally but the rocket tips failed- if the landing rotor failed entirely you were supposed to bail. They were expecting a crash speed of 35 miles per hour, well below terminal velocity.
-p
-- -Ian
Motto: "You're Not Authorized to Know Our Motto." So, like, how many lives DOES Shroedinger's cat have anyway?
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