Cell phone apparently survives 5,000-meter fall from scandalous Boeing

Several items have already been found from the Alaska Airlines Boeing, which lost a door in flight. Why a smartphone remained intact after a fall.

Portland – How can a smartphone survive a fall from 5,000 meters when some smartphones are already broken when they fall from your hand to the ground? The US has been puzzling over this ever since a tweet went viral: “I found an iPhone on the side of the road,” writes Sean Bates, a game designer from Oregon. The smartphone had no screen lock and appeared to show a baggage pickup slip from Alaska Airlines. Bates immediately suspected that the cell phone might have fallen from the Boeing 737, which lost a door mid-flight at the beginning of January and had to make an emergency landing in Portland.

As Sean Bates later said on TikTok, his first guess was that a jogger might have lost the smartphone. “It was pretty clean, had hardly any scratches, and was in the middle of the grass,” Bates said.

Cell Phone Finder cannot solve crashed cell phone puzzle

Bates first informed the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). There he was told that he had already found the second cell phone from the scandalous Boeing. In the meantime, the torn out door was also found in a front yard.

“What brand was the cell phone case and screen protector?” a user then wrote to cell phone finder Bates on Twitter.

“Haha, you were the first in thousands to ask me that question,” Bates said. He wrote on X that he no longer wanted to answer any further media inquiries. Apparently he's had enough of the hype surrounding his find. However, he was unable to provide a satisfactory answer to perhaps the all-important question: “To be honest, I didn’t check before handing over the cell phone,” he wrote.

Physicist can explain the smartphone sensation from the Boeing scandal

Could the cell phone really have been so well protected by the safety glass and case that it suffered no damage? Or is the reason somewhere else? Duncan Watts, a physicist at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, claims to have identified another reason for the cell phone's integrity. He said the Washington Postit is quite possible that the cell phone survived the fall unscathed.

“The basic answer is air resistance,” he explained. This caused the device to slow down. If the phone had hit a hard surface, it would certainly still have been damaged. But it apparently landed in the grass. “This also cushioned the fall.” It is not yet known whether the cell phone has been returned to the owner. (cat with material from the dpa)