Maybe phones can survive dropping from great heights after all. An Apple iPhone managed to survive a 16,000-foot fall from an Alaska Airlines 737 Max jet that suffered a midair blowout.
Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 dealt with a blown-off fuselage panel that triggered a sudden decompression. During this event, one of the passenger’s mobile phones had been sucked out of Boeing Co. 737 Max 9 jet’s cabin and remained in functioning condition after a 16,000-foot tumble.
The phone was found by a user named Seanathan Bates, who according to his post on X, located the device on a Portland, Oregon roadside. The phone was unlocked and had hours of battery life remaining, even displaying an email from Alaska Airlines about a baggage claim for the flight.
Bates shared more details online about the phone. When he discovered it, the device had been in airplane mode and part of the charging cord was sticking out. “It was still pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush and it didn’t have a screenlock on it,” Bates said,
The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed at a briefing that one phone was found on the side of a road and another in a yard. Both of the devices were given to the board for safekeeping. “We’ll look through those and then return them” to passengers, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy said. “It also helps in telling us, ‘Are we looking in the right area?”‘
The fuselage panel that blew off the plane was later discovered in the backyard of a Portland-based schoolteacher. Due to this issue, Flight 1282 was forced to turn back minutes after takeoff, when the panel broke loose from the fuselage. Fortunately, not one of the 171 passengers aboard the Max 9 jet was seriously injured.
The plane landed safely back in Portland about 20 minutes after takeoff, having reached more than 16,000 feet in altitude before being forced to turn around. Since then, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has temporarily grounded more than 170 Max 9 aircraft to complete safety checks before they are returned to service.
Source: https://twitter.com/SeanSafyre/status/1744138937239822685