In 1988 I was on the roof of a downtown hotel to make photographs of the Air Force 'Thunderbirds' performing at nearby Maxwell Air Force Base. They would perform a stunt over the base, then fly at fairly low altitude over the river to turn and go back to form up for another run. Perfect unobstructed vantage point for shooting, I thought.

At some point I found myself dizzy, probably from vertigo induced by looking through a camera viewfinder at an extreme angle upward, felt myself falling, and fell onto one of four 4'x8' Plexiglas skylights that let sunlight into the hotel's lobby, six floors below. The last thing I remember from my few minutes on the roof is thinking first, oh S___(expletive deleted) I'm going to destroy my camera when it hits this gravel covered roof and skin myself up. Imagine my surprise and terror when the skylight disintegrated allowing me to free fall into the lobby.

I landed in almost the middle of the bar below me which was packed with people celebrating their graduation from the senior NCO academy a bit earlier that Saturday. Luckily, I didn't land on anyone and my fall was (kind of) broken by a planter/wall dividing the bar from the rest of the atrium lobby. I broke two vertebrae in my neck collapsed a lung, rearranged several internal organs and suffered nine separate breaks in my left wrist and forearm.

The camera, a Nikon FE-2 with a Sigma 70-210 f/2.8 landed on the quarry tile floor. It went to a local camera repair shop after I was released from the hospital a couple of months later and had three sheared off screws in the lens's mounting flange removed and replaced. Functioned perfectly after that. I traded all my Nikon equipment not long after for my first auto focus camera, an EOS 630 and a couple of lenses because I was unable to hold up a camera and focus it at the same time due to injuries previously mentioned.

Though a Nikon user for years prior, I opted for the Canon because of Nikon's clunky first generation auto focus.

Can you imagine putting your tripod, camera attached, gently over your shoulder to move to a different perspective and cathump! the camera falls off and hits on an uneven brick walkway. Fellow photographers stopped somewhat stunned and said nothing while I picked up my Sony a6000 and began to discover what function if any it still possessed.
Voilà! It worked as well as ever including the kit lens. ( 16-50 ).
Just posted this to illicit other Hogs to share similar close calls or not so close. I am impressed with how well my camera is constructed. What about you?