'Holey Boeing' iPhone Falls from 5000m Altitude... "Still Alive"

Fell from 4.8 km Altitude but Unharmed
Still in 'Airplane Mode' When Found

On the 5th (local time), when a large hole was torn in the fuselage of a Boeing passenger plane, two passengers' iPhones were sucked out of the aircraft and fell to the ground. Remarkably, the two iPhones found after the Boeing aircraft made an emergency landing were still functioning normally.

An iPhone that fell from a hole in a Boeing passenger plane survived intact. [Image source=Captured from X]

On the 9th, the US IT media outlet The Verge shared the story of game designer Sean Bates, a passenger on Alaska Airlines flight 1282, a Boeing 737 Max aircraft with a hole in its fuselage. At the time of the accident, Bates's iPhone was sucked out of the plane and fell to the ground.

After the passenger plane successfully made an emergency landing, the US National Transportation Safety Board announced that it had recovered two iPhones that had fallen from the aircraft. They were found by the roadside and in a residential yard, respectively. One of them belonged to Bates.

Amazingly, the iPhones that fell to the ground were still intact. Bates wrote on X, "It survived perfectly. The battery was half full and it was still in airplane mode," adding, "It fell from 16,000 feet (about 4.87 km) and survived," expressing his astonishment.

An iPhone that fell from a hole in a Boeing passenger plane survived intact. [Image source=Capture from X]

How could a phone that fell from several kilometers above still be intact? In fact, this kind of drop impact test has been conducted before. In 2011, the US tech media Wired conducted an experiment dropping an iPhone 4 from outside a flying aircraft, and even then, the iPhone survived without damage.

A hole pierced on the side of the fuselage of Alaska Airlines Flight 1281 737 Max passenger plane, which took off from Portland Airport, Oregon, USA on the 5th (local time) but returned and made an emergency landing due to a pressure problem.
[Image source: Provided by Kyle Rinker’s X account, Reuters Yonhap News]
Photo by Kyle Rinker

When an object falls from a high place, it accelerates due to gravity. However, an object does not accelerate indefinitely. After falling a certain distance, it reaches its terminal velocity, at which point it no longer accelerates and falls at a constant speed. This means that beyond a certain height, the impact the iPhone experiences is the same.

Ultimately, The Verge explains that whether the iPhone survives depends not on how high it falls from, but where it lands. If the drop zone has soft vegetation that can appropriately disperse the impact, the chances of the iPhone surviving increase.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.