He found an iPhone by the road. The smartphone fell out of a plane, flew 5 km and looks like new

Seanathan Bates found his lost iPhone while walking in Portland. There would be nothing unexpected about this, if not for the fact that after clicking the power button, the device screen displayed confirmation of payment for checking in baggage on the ASA1282 route from Portland to Ontario, California, on Alaska Airlines, and the smartphone itself was in airplane mode.

The smartphone flew 5 km and landed in the bushes. Looks like new

The American guessed that he was dealing with an object that . The emergency door fell off the fuselage of the plane shortly after take-off from Portland, which forced the plane to make an emergency landing at the airport from which it took off. No one was hurt because the passengers were still strapped in with their seatbelts, but some of the items on the plane were sucked out.

Fortunately, the finder of the iPhone did not steal the phone, but contacted the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which confirmed that it was in fact one of the items that fell out of the plane. According to the finder himself, this is the second smartphone that fell from a damaged Alaska Airlines Boeing and was found after an emergency landing.

I found my iPhone on the side of the road… still on airplane mode, with half the battery and an open Alaska Airlines ASA1282 baggage claim. It survived a 16,000-foot fall perfectly! When I called, Zoe from the NTSB said this was the SECOND call they had found. Still no door yet

– Bates wrote on Monday on his channel on the website X. The door he mentioned

Seanathan Bates describes noticing the iPhone in the grass near some bushes, right next to the asphalt road. What surprised the finder was the fact that the device survived a fall from a height of approx. 16,000 meters. feet (approx. 4.8 km) almost unscathed. He said he found the iPhone clean and scratch-free. Only a fragment of the cable was still stuck in the charging socket. When the smartphone fell out of the plane, it was most likely being charged, and the enormous force that acted on it severed the cable, leaving the plug in the phone’s socket.

How could the iPhone survive a 5 km fall? This is not due to Apple, but to physics

Of course, no smartphone is designed to survive a fall from 5 km, and the almost perfect condition of this device is partly due to coincidence and partly to the laws of physics. As Duncan Watts, a scientist from the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, stated in an interview, an iPhone falling from a huge height does not accelerate to an extreme speed due to significant air resistance. Every free-falling body sooner or later reaches the so-called terminal speed, i.e. the maximum speed to which air resistance allows it to accelerate.

The theoretical limit speed of a smartphone is approximately 100 miles per hour (160 km/h), but only when the screen is constantly directed perpendicular to the Earth’s surface (edge ​​down). When placed flat with the screen (or back) down, the phone can only reach 30 miles per hour (48 km/h). The falling iPhone was probably spinning quickly, so the scientist estimates that it could only have accelerated to about 50 miles per hour (80 km/h). For comparison, an iPhone falling out of a pocket reaches approximately 10 miles per hour (16 km/h) when it hits the ground.

The second factor is coincidence. The smartphone fell on bushes, which probably significantly reduced the speed of the device. Then he hit the wet, soft grass, which additionally cushioned the fall. If the iPhone had fallen on a road 2-3 meters away, it probably would not have been found in one piece. “The Washington Post” reminds that in June 2023, TikTok user Hatton Smith published a video of his parachute jump, during which he lost his phone. The device flew freely for almost 4.3 km and survived the fall into a swampy area unscathed.