by The iPhone was lying on the ground, in airplane mode, with its battery half full. The screen, completely intact, showed a $70 receipt for two checked bags on Alaska Airlines flight 1282.
A social media user named Sean Bates found the device while walking down Barnes Road near Highway 217 in Portland, Ore., he previously posted on X, Twitter, on Sunday.
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“Survived a 16,000 foot fall,” he tweeted. When he called the National Transportation Safety Board, the federal agency that investigated the incident, to report the phone, he learned “it was the SECOND phone that was found,” he wrote.
When a door plug on an Alaska Airlines plane blew minutes after takeoff on Friday, it left a gaping, door-shaped hole in the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane. A handful of objects were ejected from the plane that was 16,000 feet in the sky. The iPhone Bates found was likely one of them, the NTSB told media outlets.
The aircraft made an emergency landing, and although the interior of the plane was extensively damaged, everyone on board survived.
It is unclear if the other phone, found in a yard according to the NTSB, was an iPhone. The NTSB did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Post.
A broken plug was still inside the charging socket, according to a photo posted by Bates, which suggested the phone was charging when it was pulled out due to an explosive depressurization accident.
The iPhone knows a lot of things—dropping 16,000 feet from an airplane isn’t one of them. Almost anyone who owns a smartphone has had the experience of dropping one and cracking the screen.
And while smartphone screens have gotten a lot stronger over the years, this phone is likely to survive because of physics.
“The basic answer is air resistance,” said Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. “I think the counterintuitive thing here is that an iPhone falling from the sky doesn’t move that fast because of air resistance.”
Any object falling through towards the Earth will reach a point, known as its terminal velocity, where the force of gravity can no longer accelerate it due to resistance from the air in the atmosphere.
“If the phone is falling with its screen facing the ground, there is a lot of drag, but if the phone is falling straight up and down, there is a little less,” said Watts. “In reality, the phone would be falling a lot, and there would be a lot of wind, which would cause an upward force.”
The terminal velocity of a big-screen iPhone, according to Watts, would be about 30 mph. “The bigger the iPhone, the lower the terminal velocity,” he said. “The maximum is about 100 mph, but that would only happen if the phone screen was perpendicular to the ground.”
Watts said that when we drop a phone from waist height, it hits the ground at about 10 mph, while a phone dropped from the top of an airplane probably only reaches 50 mph.
Watts pointed out that the phone would certainly be damaged if it landed on a stone or pavement, but the grass or foliage that appears to have fallen on it cushioned the fall.
“If the iPhone fell on a patch of grass, it certainly could have survived the fall,” Watts said. “Had the phone been facing straight, it would have gone from about 30 mph to stationary on a fairly cushy surface, which would have been a little less impactful than I’d decided to put it on.”
According to Apple, the company that created the iPhone, dropping the device can damage it. Apple’s user guide does not specify how high the iPhone is intended to survive.
“Handle iPhone with care. It is made of metal, glass, and plastic and has sensitive electronic components inside” said the guide. “Your iPhone or its battery can be damaged if dropped, burned, punctured or crushed, or if it comes into contact with liquid.”
In a TikTok video uploaded on Sunday by Bates, who did not respond to a request for comment on Monday, he said he found the phone under a bush while on a walk looking for things that might have fallen from the plane. He was “a little suspicious at first” that it belonged to an Alaska Airlines passenger.
After he opened it, he found a travel confirmation for the Alaska Airlines flight and that’s when he called the NTSB, he said. “It was still pretty clean,” he said. “There are no scratches on it.”
It seems that this is not the first time that an iPhone has survived falling from the sky. In June 2023, a TikTok user named Hatton Smith posted a video in which he said his iPhone survived after it flew out of his pocket while sky diving at 14,000 feet.
The phone landed in a muddy grassy area, as seen in the video inlet within his TikTok.
In both cases, if the iPhone had landed on concrete, it probably wouldn’t have survived.
“If he fell on wet ground, I could see he had about an inch of cushion,” Watts said. “That’s maybe what plopping down on a chair would feel like.”
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