Apple iPhone 15 Pro survives fall from a height of 16,000 feet
If you read the news regularly, you’ve probably heard about Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. A panel in the fuselage of the Boeing 737 Max 9 simply flew off while climbing to cruising altitude on a domestic US flight between Portland, Oregon, and Ontario, California. As a result, the cabin pressure went down and sucked various things into the atmosphere. Including an Apple iPhone 15 Pro.
The flying Apple iPhone was subsequently found by Seanathan Bates, a game designer and .NET developer. He found it while walking on the side of the road and then, of course, handed it over to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which subsequently investigated the incident. On the phone was an email from Alaska Airlines about a baggage receipt for Flight 1282. There was also a broken charging plug in the usb-c port, which was simply torn apart by the force of the burst. The iPhone, however, is undamaged.
Now we have seen many drop tests over time. But nothing like this – this iPhone practically survived a skydive from 16,000 feet (that’s almost 5,000 m) without a parachute. Apple would probably not use this incident for an advertising campaign for ethical reasons. But when it comes to durability, this case is hard to top.
Now you naturally ask yourself how a random fuselage part can just say goodbye in the air like that. In fact, it is not a random part. For the same aircraft model – Boeing 737 Max 9 – some airlines order more seats. More seats means a legal requirement for more emergency exit doors, and this is exactly where one of them would have been.
Other airlines need fewer seats and therefore one less emergency exit door (like Alaska Airlines). Boeing’s cheap solution is then to close the door with a permanent “plug”. Accordingly, the incident does not appear to be a coincidence. Of course, the NTSB’s investigation has just begun, so it will be interesting to see the results.
