If you pay attention to world news, you’re probably familiar with Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. As you climb to cruising altitude on a domestic U.S. flight between Portland, Oregon, and Ontario, California, a panel in the fuselage of the Boeing 737 Max 9 the plane simply exploded causing a loss of cabin pressure and many things were simply thrown into the air.
One of those things was an iPhone recovered by Seanathan Bates, a game designer and .NET application developer. He found it on the side of a road while taking a walk and then, of course, handed it over to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which is investigating the accident.
Found an iPhone on the side of the road… Still in airplane mode with half battery and open at baggage claim #AlaskaAirlines ASA1282 Survived a fall from 16,000 feet perfectly intact!
When I called him, Zoe answered @NTSB he said it was the SECOND phone to find. Still no door😅 pic.twitter.com/CObMikpuFd
— Seanathan Bates (@SeanSafyre) January 7, 2024
On the phone was an email from Alaska Airlines regarding a baggage check for Flight 1282. Oh, and a broken charging plug – the force of the panel’s burst simply tore through the cord. But the iPhone is fine.
Now, we’ve seen a lot of drop tests during our time. But nothing of the sort: this iPhone practically survived the launch of a plane that was at around 16,000 feet at the time, or almost 5,000 m altitude. And he fell to the ground, and he’s fine. We’re pretty sure Apple would never use this incident as advertising (after all, the ethics are highly questionable), but when it comes to “durability,” we can’t think of anything that could top this.
In case you’re wondering how a random fuselage panel could explode in mid-air like this, it turns out it’s not a random panel. For the same airplane model (Boeing 737 Max 9), some airlines other than Alaska Airlines order theirs with more seats. More seating means a legal requirement for more emergency exit doors, and that’s exactly where one of those would have been.
For airlines that don’t have so many seats that they require an additional emergency exit door (like Alaska Airlines), Boeing’s cost-effective solution has been to replace the door with a permanent cap. This is what happened and it doesn’t seem like a coincidence at all. Of course the NTSB investigation has just begun, so let’s see what the results will be.
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