Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
The iPhone was lying on the ground in airplane mode with a half-charged battery. On the fully intact screen was a $70 receipt for two checked bags on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.
A social media user named Sean Bates found the device while walking along Barnes Road near Highway 217 in Portland, Oregon Posted on Xformerly Twitter, on Sunday.
“Survived a 16,000 foot fall,” he tweeted. When he called the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency investigating the incident, to report the phone, he learned that “it was the SECOND phone found,” he wrote.
When a door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane exploded minutes after takeoff Friday evening, it left a gaping, door-shaped hole in the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane. A handful of objects were sucked out of the plane, which was 16,000 feet in the sky. The iPhone found by Bates was most likely one of them, the NTSB told the media.
The plane had to make an emergency landing and although there was significant damage to the interior of the plane, everyone on board survived.
It's unclear whether the other phone, which the NTSB said was found in a yard, was an iPhone. The NTSB did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post.
According to a photo posted by Bates, a broken plug was still in the charging port, suggesting the phone was in the process of charging when it was sucked out in an accident that is being investigated as an explosive pressure loss.
I found an iPhone on the side of the road… Still in airplane mode with half battery and open for baggage claim #AlaskaAirlines ASA1282 survived a 16,000-foot drop perfectly!
When I called it, Zoe was there @NTSB said it was the SECOND phone found. No door yet😅 pic.twitter.com/CObMikpuFd
– Seanathan Bates (@SeanSafyre) January 7, 2024
The iPhone is known for many things – surviving a 16,000-foot fall from a plane isn't one of them. Almost everyone who owns a smartphone has had the experience of dropping one and breaking the screen.
And although smartphone screens have become much more powerful over the years, this phone's survival most likely comes down to physics.
“The basic answer is air resistance,” said Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. “I think what's counterintuitive is that an iPhone falling from the sky doesn't move as fast because of air resistance.”
Any object falling toward Earth reaches a point, called terminal velocity, where gravity can no longer accelerate it due to the resistance of the air in the atmosphere.
“If the phone falls to the ground with the screen on, the air resistance is quite large, but if the phone falls straight up and down, the resistance is significantly less,” Watts said. “In reality, the phone would tumble quite a bit and get quite a bit of wind, essentially creating a lifting force.”
The ultimate downward velocity of a large-screen iPhone would be about 30 miles per hour, according to Watts. “The larger the iPhone, the slower the top speed,” he said. “The maximum is around 100 miles per hour, but that would only happen if the phone screen was perpendicular to the ground.”
Watts said that if we drop a phone from waist height, it will hit the ground at about 10 miles per hour, while a phone dropped from the top of a plane will likely only reach 50 miles per hour.
Watts pointed out that the phone would certainly have been damaged if it had landed on a rock or sidewalk, but the grass or leaves it appeared to have fallen on cushioned its fall.
“If the iPhone had fallen on a grassy area, it definitely would have survived the fall,” Watts said. “If the phone were pointed straight down, it would have come to a stop at about 30 miles per hour on a relatively soft surface, which requires slightly less force than if I had decided to stomp on it.”
According to Apple, the company that developed the iPhone, dropping the device can cause damage. Apple's user manual does not specify how high the iPhone should withstand a fall.
“Be careful with your iPhone. “It is made of metal, glass and plastic and contains sensitive electronic components inside,” the guide said. “The iPhone or its battery can be damaged if it is dropped, burned, punctured, crushed, or if it comes into contact with liquid.”
In a TikTok video uploaded on Sunday by Bates, who did not respond to a request for comment on Monday, he said he found the phone under a bush as he went for a walk looking for things from the plane could have fallen. He was “a little skeptical at first” that it was an Alaska Airlines passenger.
After opening it, he found a travel confirmation for the Alaska Airlines flight and then called the NTSB, he said. “It was still pretty clean,” he said. “No scratches on it.”
This apparently isn't the first time an iPhone has survived falling from the sky. In June 2023, a TikTok user named Hatton Smith posted a video in which he said his iPhone survived after it flew out of his pocket while skydiving at 14,000 feet.
The phone landed in a grassy, muddy area, as seen in the video post on his TikTok.
If the iPhone had landed on concrete, it probably wouldn't have survived in either case.
“When it fell on damp ground, I could see it had about an inch of padding,” Watts said. “This is probably what it would feel like if you collapsed into a chair.”