iPhone, with alleged owner of Vietnamese descent, survives 5,000-meter fall from Alaska Airlines flight
Tuesday, January 09, 2024, 17:18 GMT+7
An iPhone, purportedly owned by an individual of Vietnamese origin, fell 5,000 meters from an Alaska Airlines flight and landed with an intact screen and a battery still half-charged.
The phone was sucked out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Friday when a fuselage panel blew off, leaving a gaping hole, AFP reported on Tuesday.
The passenger plane made an emergency landing shortly after, with all aboard safe.
A few items, reportedly including AirPods and a boy’s shirt, made more dramatic landings after shooting out of the suddenly depressurized cabin.
Amid a search for debris, a man named Sean Bates in the northwestern state of Washington found an iPhone on the side of the road, appearing to belong to one of the passengers.
A photo of the device posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday showed the intact screen and an emailed $70 baggage receipt.
The passenger’s name on the baggage receipt is Cuong Tran, indicating that the iPhone owner might have Vietnamese heritage.
The battery is shown charged to 44 percent and the smartphone remains in flight mode.
Aside from the port, where the terminal of the charger protrudes after being ripped from the rest of the cord, the phone appears untouched.
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| A man inspects a hole in the cabin of a Boeing airplane, the result of a fuselage panel blowing off mid-flight. Handout via AFP |
This phone’s survival is most likely because of physics, The Washington Post cited Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, as saying.
“The basic answer is air resistance,” Watts told The Post.
“I think the counterintuitive thing here is that an iPhone falling from the sky doesn’t end up moving that quickly because of air resistance.”
In a follow-up TikTok post, Bates said he had found the phone “pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush.”
Bates said he contacted the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which told him it was the second phone from the flight to have been found.
NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy replied to his post on X thanking him and offering to meet.
In a briefing on Sunday, Homendy told reporters, “We’ll look through [the phones] and then return them,” adding that it was “very, very fortunate” that the incident had not ended in tragedy.
In response to the incident, regulatory bodies swiftly grounded some versions of Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 jet, pending inspections.
Boeing shares plunged in trading on Monday.
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