Part of the cabin wall of a Boeing 737 Max flew off during the flight. A smartphone may have been sucked in and survived the fall unharmed. It's not the only cell phone.
Battery half full, flight mode and no scratches: in the USA, an iPhone apparently survived almost unharmed a fall from 5,000 meters from a Boeing 737 that made an emergency landing on Friday. A man in the northwestern US state of Washington wrote on the online service TikTok on Sunday after finding the iPhone, which probably belongs to one of the passengers, that he found the cell phone “pretty clean and without scratches in the bushes”.
APA / AFP / Brochure Portal/NTSB APA / AFP / Brochure
The Apple cell phone was apparently sucked out of the plane when part of the cabin wall flew off shortly after takeoff. A photo of the device that the finder published on the online service flight. Other than the charging cable connection point, the phone appeared to be intact.
The Washington man said he contacted the NTSB after the discovery. She told him it was the second machine phone someone had found.
“A great stroke of luck”
Agency chief Jennifer Homendy said at a news conference that the NTSB “will analyze the phones and then return them.” It was “a great stroke of luck” that the technical defect that led to the plane’s emergency landing “did not end in tragedy”.
Alaska Airlines flight number 1282 took off from Portland in the northwestern United States on Friday and was en route to Ontario, California, when the cabin part came loose. The plane then turned around and made an emergency landing in Portland about 20 minutes later. Nobody is hurt.
Following the incident, the FAA ordered immediate inspections of approximately 170 Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft and imposed flight bans on some of them until they were completed. Airlines around the world removed planes from service, leading to dozens of flight cancellations over the weekend. (APA)