Man's iPhone fell from Alaska Airlines plane and survived: how?

An iPhone suffered a fall from almost 5,000 meters and emerged unharmed. After the Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 incident was reported, during which a panel was detached from the plane, causing cabin depressurization and several objects being thrown into the air, a young man from Oregon found the phone of one of the passengers. To his surprise, it worked perfectly and he even had the travel confirmation and the baggage check receipt.

Sean Bates found the iPhone of one of the passengers of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Barnes Road, near Highway 217, in Portland, Oregon, and, after notifying the authorities, he spread the story on his social networks. “I wanted an excuse to go for a walk this afternoon, and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had asked people to go and report anything that looked like it had fallen off from the recent accident.” “, the man said on TikTok, after the discovery.

“I was, of course, a little skeptical. At first I thought he might have fallen out of a car or someone had dropped it while walking. I found it quite clean, without scratches, under a bush and It didn't have a screen lock, so I opened it and there was an airplane mode, with travel confirmation and baggage check-in. for Alaska Airlines Flight 1282,” said the video game designer and programmer.

When he contacted the authorities, discovered that they were in the area, as they were still searching for the piece of fuselage that had detached, which was later located in the backyard of an Oregon professor's home. “The funniest thing is that I called the NTSB and they were already in the area, so I went over to meet with them and They had already found another phone“, the man revealed.

How did the iPhone survive a fall of more than 5,000 meters?

Anyone who has a smartphone knows the anguish of seeing a broken screen after a small fall. However, The phone that Sean Bates found had no scratches or damagebut it did have the charger plug stuck, which could have broken when it was removed from the cabin of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282.

But how did the iPhone escape unscathed after falling from a plane? According to Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, “The basic answer is air resistance,” said the specialist to Washington Post. “I think the counterintuitive thing here is that an iPhone falling from the sky doesn't end up moving as fast because of air resistance,” she added.

Any falling object reaches a point called terminal velocity, where it cannot continue accelerating, since the air presents resistance. “If the phone is falling with the screen facing the ground, there is quite a bit of resistance, but if the phone is falling straight up and down, there is less,” Watts explained. “In reality, the phone would do quite a few cartwheels and receive quite a bit of wind, essentially exerting an upward force,” the scientist describes.

“The larger the iPhone, the lower the terminal speed”explained Watts, who considers that the maximum speed that the device could reach, falling vertically, would be 257 kilometers per hour, while if it moved horizontally, with the screen exerting resistance, it would reach 50 kilometers per hour.

“If the iPhone had fallen on a grassy knoll, then it definitely could have survived the fall,” Watts said. “If the phone was facing downwards, it would have gone from about 50 kilometers per hour to stopping on a relatively soft surface, a little less force than if I had decided to step on it”, concluded the specialist.