If you've ever wondered what it's like to be in a passenger plane when it goes down, today's your lucky day.

On Friday, Discovery Channel just happened to have a few cameras on board a Boeing 727 when it bellyflopped and broke up after smashing into the Sonoran Desert in Mexico - because it put them there.

The plane was empty of human cargo, but loaded with crash test dummies.

The pilot? Ejected from the cockpit just minutes before impact.

All of which helps make the end result so spectacular, and you'll be able to see it from several angles if you're watching Discovery Channel's Curiosity show later this year.

The aim of what seems like an enormous waste of aircraft was to "recreate a serious, but survivable, passenger jet crash landing with a real aircraft," Discovery said.

"This groundbreaking project features an actual crash of a passenger jet and explores the big questions about how to make plane crashes more survivable," Discovery's president Eileen O'Neill explained.

If you've seen Alive, you'll know that -- apart from making yourself look as unappetising as possible -- the first step is to sit in the back row.

Aftermath shots of the Obviously, it was all very highly controlled, and filmed from several different angles, including from other planes above and behind the doomed Boeing.

Discovery say the aircraft will be salvaged and assured media an "extensive environmental cleanup operation" was being carried out.

The last time a controlled crash of this scale was carried out was in 1984, when NASA and the Federal Aviation Authority crashed a Boeing 720 into California's Mojave Desert.