iPhone Survives 16,000-Foot Fall From Alaska Air Flight (bloomberg.com) 76
An anonymous reader shares a report: Among the harrowing details of the blown-off fuselage panel that triggered a sudden decompression event on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, one revelation seemed to defy the laws of physics: one of the mobile phones that had been sucked out of the Boeing 737 Max 9 jet's cabin remained in functioning condition after a 16,000-foot tumble. A new-generation Apple iPhone landed intact, unlocked and with hours of battery life remaining on a Portland, Oregon roadside, according to a post on X by a user calling himself Seanathan Bates, who said he discovered the device. The screen showed an email from Alaska Airlines about a baggage claim for the flight, based on Bates' photos.
The phone was in airplane mode, Bates said in a TikTok video. "It was still pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush and it didn't have a screenlock on it," he said. The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed at a briefing on Sunday that one phone was found on the side of a road and another in a yard. The people have handed in both of the devices, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters.
The phone was in airplane mode, Bates said in a TikTok video. "It was still pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush and it didn't have a screenlock on it," he said. The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed at a briefing on Sunday that one phone was found on the side of a road and another in a yard. The people have handed in both of the devices, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy told reporters.
Looks like (Score:4, Funny)
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Hardly, this iPhone had to land in soft vegetation growing in spongy mud right after the rain in order to survive. Mind you it wasn't always like this, legend has it that spot was once a hardened ceramic factory until some idiot dropped a 3310 on it.
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Luckily, the plane was only at 16,000 feet. Other things like human bodies might have been sucked out of the airplane due to more pressure difference at twice this altitude and we would have been able to compare iPhone vs human survivability for the same fall.
Obligatory :) Re:Liquid damage (Score:1)
"Pics or it didn't happen."
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"Pics or it didn't happen."
Pics show it didn't happen. The iPhone was wet [twitter.com] and still functional.
Meanwhile if my kids sneezes at their screen (Score:3, Funny)
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"It shatters into a trillion pieces and the battery dies."
That's a Samsung.
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No, Samsungs burn.
You're thinking Motorola. Though, to give props, my hella-shattered screen still works.
Terminal velocity. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Terminal velocity. (Score:4, Interesting)
Terminal velocity depends on air density, so as the phone was falling down, it likely slowed down.
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I wonder if Apple can get a GPS route for the phone. It was in airplane mode so it wasn't uploading data to Apple servers, but maybe it caches it locally?
Obviously it didn't hit a hard surface, but considering that it fell out of a flying plane, it also had a considerable lateral velocity vector at the beginning, although that started to dissipate the moment it left the aircraft. It might have still preserved enough to hit the ground diagonally.
Wind is also a factor, it might have been caught in the engine
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The proverbial "aircraft landing" use case includes bringing in data from another source (called WAAS when I last cared, but probably just a variant on Differential GPS, where a fixed ground GPS sensor is used to transmit ionospheric retardation data to suitable receivers, and considerably improve all directions accuracy) to add to the GPS satellite timing data.
The only important point in this story is
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Even still it hit something very soft that allowed it to come to rest over at least a foot or two. If it had fallen on pavement it would have definitely crushed a corner and shattered all the glass.
And still been functional.
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One important component of which is humidity. You need to include that in your terminal velocity estimation.
Re:Terminal velocity. (Score:4, Funny)
Aim for the bushes!
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Q : what do you do when your main and reserve chutes fail?
A : Cross your left leg over right, and left hand over right forearm.
Q: Why?
A: because the recovery team will cut a slot across the top of your head and screw you out of the ground.
Wait a minute. Repeat first Q :
A: You try to land head first.
Q: Why?
A: it's quicker that way.
Vale, "gorgeous George", you were a good friend.
Re:Terminal velocity. (Score:5, Informative)
Also, an iPhone only weighs about 7oz. The amount of energy from its impact into an energy absorbing body like soft soil is going to be minimal.
An iPhone dropped onto pavement from a couple of meters probably has more force applied to it than this one.
It also sounds like it fell through some trees.
Remember, there are PEOPLE who have fallen tens of thousands of feet from planes and survived.
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"Found under a bush by the side of the road" may indicate it had a relatively soft landing.
That doesn't even say the half of it, look at the pictures. It would have fallen through a relatively densely branched bush onto a soft thick weedy surface that is itself growing on soft mud.
New meaning for "airplane mode" (Score:4, Funny)
it is when the phone itself becomes a glider.
Next gen iPhone is planned with deployable turbine.
Unlocked? (Score:1)
Note to self: Always set phone to lock in event its altitude changes from 16,000 feet to ground level in a very short time.
Seriously though, phones that don't auto-lock after a period of time are rarely a good idea.
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I can't be bothered to find a non-paywalled source to confirm, but my interpretation of the comment is that the user had an email notification on their lock screen that could be seen without unlocking the device. That'd be fixed by changing your "Show Previews" setting for notifications from "Always" to "When Unlocked" - not by setting an auto-lock timeout.
Tweet (Xeet?) shows more than a preview (Score:3, Informative)
Seanthean Bates on X posted a tweet that showed the mail [twitter.com], not just the preview screen.
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Re:Tweet (Xeet?) shows more than a preview (Score:4, Interesting)
In order for that to happen, the user had to intentionally bypass more than one setup screen encouraging them to set a passcode and face recognition.
I've got a few iPhones without passcodes. They're used as lightswitches and have no useful information on them.
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I can't be bothered to find a non-paywalled source to confirm, but my interpretation of the comment is that the user had an email notification on their lock screen that could be seen without unlocking the device. That'd be fixed by changing your "Show Previews" setting for notifications from "Always" to "When Unlocked" - not by setting an auto-lock timeout.
Or he had his screen auto lock interval set to "Never."
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Note to self: Always set phone to lock in event its altitude changes from 16,000 feet to ground level in a very short time.
Seriously though, phones that don't auto-lock after a period of time are rarely a good idea.
The User had to turn off the Auto-Lock. It is on by Default.
Not surprised (Score:5, Funny)
It landed in one piece? Well it was in airplane mode.
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It landed in one piece? Well it was in airplane mode.
Really? If iPhones had any kind of airplane mode worthy of that name the thing would have come in for a perfect three points landing at a nearby airfield in close cooperation with air traffic control and in strict compliance with FAA regulations. Android phones have had that feature for years!!! ... Apple really needs to up it's game, iPhones making roadside crash landings all over the place is just not acceptable.
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If not registered with the FAA, the owner is in serious trouble
#threefeloniesaday
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Funny)
If only the plane had been in airplane mode...
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Must have been in Airbus mode, not Boeing mode then. It didn't lose parts of itself or smash into pieces when it hit the ground.
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You've won this thread.
Unlocked? (Score:2)
Protective case (Score:2, Insightful)
This is a testament to the bulky rubbery case clearly visible in the screenshot.
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Story with more details: it had a protective case (Score:2)
Mint's version of the story [livemint.com] says "The smartphone was found equipped with a hard case for added protection."
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That is some seriously good PR for whichever company made the case.
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Yeah, that tracks.
Looks like an otterbox or similar that has a rubber part. Hard cases with rubber are pretty much indestructible from normal use, but they disintegrate when put in cell phone mounts.
Just based on the photos, it's also pretty clear it was ripped out of the hands of whoever had it, as the charging end was still in the bottom.
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Terminal velocity and soft ground (Score:5, Interesting)
one revelation seemed to defy the laws of physics...
Only if you don't understand physics...
Damage to falling objects largely determined by three things: how fast it's going when it hits the ground, how hard the surface is where it hits, and how good the object is at dealing with the shock in the orientation that it strikes the ground. We know that the phone was found on the side of the road. If this was a grass verge rather than sidewalk then it likely hit soft ground (it's Portland in winter; it either was raining or it just rained). We can't know the orientation for sure but given it was blown out of a moving aircraft and it's not a smooth, aerodynamic object, we can guess it was tumbling, so it likely struck the ground with the edge of the frame, not the face. As for how fast it was going, someone helpfully already calculated [wired.com] the terminal velocity of an iPhone and came up with 12.2m/s face down or 42.8 m/s edge on. Tumbling, asymmetric objects tend to have higher drag coefficients than stable ones and since the phone was likely tumbling it's unlikely to have been going faster than the face-down speed. If the ground was soft and the phone left an inch-deep dent where it hit then it would have only sustained about 600g of shock, so it surviving the fall is not that surprising. It's just lucky it didn't hit the road.
Re: Terminal velocity and soft ground (Score:2)
Re: Terminal velocity and soft ground (Score:5, Funny)
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Well, it does seem to defy the laws of physics as commonly taught in introduction courses (spherical cows in a vacuum).
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Cue the obligatory XKCD cartoon [xkcd.com]!
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May have been doing much better than tumbling, you can toss a board or piece of metal that shape from a height and with a bit of spin it will keep spinning, and create lift. Magnus effect, even though not spherical / round.
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I expected someone would have calculated it - terminal velocity calculations are around, I just didn't care enough to look them up. 44 to 150 km/hr sounds reasonable.
Any tumbling would have been damped to some degree on it's way down (then excited again by wind shear ; meh), so I'd suspect it would tend towards the upper end of that range,
Already saw that in Ant Man, want the data (Score:2)
Lockout period (Score:4, Insightful)
(the above is a joke, in case you couldn't tell)
You may be joking, but ..... (Score:2)
You may have intended it to be a joke, but not having a reasonably-short lockout time is "a breach of basic security" in most cases.
I do understand the joke about "must set timeout as less than time it takes to fall 16,000 feet and land next to a random person." Fastest-case scenario [slashdot.org] would have that at 1-2 minutes or so.
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I wonder how much battery power it had left.
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This phone* had roughly half its power (44%) left at the time pictures were taken after it was found.
Worth noting, however, that it also had what was left of a power cable that had been plugged into the phone when decompression occurred. The cable's housing was sheared off, but you can still see it connected to the phone in some pictures. Given that the baggage ticket was on the screen when they opened it, it seems like the owner probably wasn't using the phone when they lost it, just charging it after lett
Survived from 33,000 feet (Score:5, Informative)
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She was in rather worse condition than that iPhone, however, according to Wikipedia having broken almost every bone in her body, spending half a year in hospital and sixteen months recuperating.
Consumer Reports is going to have to up its game (Score:1)
Consumer Reports did some physical stress tests [consumerreports.org] on the iPhone 15 Pro Max last year. They called it durable, but I don't think they included the "sucked out of an airplane at 16,000 feet" test. Perhaps they should add it to their test protocol.
I'm not sure why this is news (Score:4, Interesting)
First, while 16k feet sounds like a lot, the very specifically helpful link below shows that the phone hit terminal velocity pretty quickly thus whether it's 100' or 100,000 ft is irrelevant.
https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/uploa... [vox-cdn.com]
And given that the phone was described as found under a bush ...well, let's remember that famously-delicate EGGS can fall from a rather great height (50+ feet, and they probably have a much higher terminal velocity anyway) and - as long as they land in grass - come out just fine.
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I wish I could upvote you.
When I read the story, I admit my first thought was of a smartphone I got maybe 15(?) years ago.
I DON'T KNOW WHY I DID THIS - we had little kids at the time, that might have been why - I opened the box while I was sitting on the tiled floor of our kitchen. As I was unpacking it, I laid the phone on my thigh, and shifting a little, it slid off. This wasn't free-fall - it literally just slid off the outside of my thigh and to the tile. MAYBE the length of the phone?
It hit the tile
No way (Score:4, Funny)
phone was in airplane mode (Score:2)
Need I say more?
Siri (Score:5, Funny)
Musing aloud: "Hey, Surely it's not going to rain today..."
iPhone: "It's 62 degrees and partly cloudy with a chance of showers after 4 PM. And don't call me Shirley!"
My phone was in Airplane Mode.
Refund (Score:2)
How am I the first person (Score:3)
...to draw the obvious conclusion that Apple's black-ops division sabotaged this plane as a publicity stunt due to a lack of sufficient growth in iphone sales from 2023 Q4? Sure, a few dozen people could have died, but think of the tens of millions of people whose lives will be improved by moving over to iPhone.
Data-enabled Airplane Mode? (Score:2)
The phone was found in Airplane Mode, but still received an email while it was waiting to be found?
The phone flew some distance (Score:4, Informative)
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Sense of Humor? (Score:2)
Not even a cracked screen. (Score:2)
Certainly illustrates the advantages of having a case and screen protector. I thought iPhones came from the factory with cracked screens, given how often I've seen them in that condition.
Follow up Questions (Score:1)