Physicist reveals how an iPhone survived 16,000-foot plunge from Alaska ... trends now
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A physicist has explained the mystery of how an iPhone fell 16,000 feet from Alaska Airlines flight 1282 and still worked.
While many Apple users will be familiar with their devices shattering from a simple 10-foot drop or toppling down a flight of stairs, whether the phone breaks or not comes down to the phone’s velocity and the angle at which it falls.
When a cellphone is dropped from around waist height, it hits the ground at a speed of about 10 mph and because there is no wind drag to slow its fall, it will be damaged, the opposite is true when the iPhone fell from the airplane.
An Apple iPhone survived a 16,000-foot drop from Alaska Airlines flight 1282
Physicist Duncan Watts said air resistance from falling out of the Boeing 737 Max 9 plane (pictured) slowed the phone's acceleration and the bush it fell on cushioned its fall, protecting the phone from damage
Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo, said air resistance slowed the phone down to 50 mph and the bush it landed in acted as a cushion to protect it from damage.
‘If the phone is falling with its screen facing the ground, there’s quite a lot of drag, but if the phone is falling straight up and down, there’s quite a bit less,’ Watts told The Washington Post.
‘In reality, the phone would be tumbling quite a bit, and get quite a lot of wind essentially giving an upward force.’
Watts clarified that a phone falling from that height would travel at a
