Captain America‘s MCU journey was long, arduous and very eventful. Despite beginning his life as a scrawny weakling, he went on to become a hero in World War II, a modern-day superhero key to saving Earth on multiple occasions, ended up as a fugitive on the run from the law, and finally journeyed through time in order to gather the Infinity Stones and stop Thanos.
After all that sacrifice, we were more than happy to see him get a happy ending in Avengers: Endgame. But fans wonder whether the whole saga could have gone very differently if Steve made some other choices in The First Avenger. At the climax of that movie he’s desperate to stop the H.Y.D.R.A. flying wing from reaching the U.S., choosing to crash it into the icy ocean. Steve spends the next few decades as an ice cube, being thawed out just in time for The Avengers.
But, if he’d have jumped out, could he have survived?
The limits of what the Super Soldier Serum can do are somewhat loosely defined, though the fact that Steve survived being frozen for so long indicates his body can withstand the cold. Replies agree that as he remained inside the plane and ended up frozen regardless, the fuselage clearly doesn’t provide much protection against the freezing temperatures. Others point out that if Steve had bailed and hit the water he may have simply drowned, which could have outright killed him, or prevented him from ever being found.
It’s also noted that there’s an Endgame deleted scene that asks this exact question. James Rhodes asks Steve why he crashed the plane, getting the simple reply “the bomb’s on board”. Rhodes hits back, “and you couldn’t have jumped out of the plane before you crashed it?” The scene ends here without Rogers’ response, so we may never officially know.
