That’s what’s known as “airplane mode”—an iPhone that fell 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) from an Alaska Airlines aircraft and landed with the battery just halfway charged and not even a crack in the screen.
On Friday, a fuselage panel on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew off, leaving a huge hole through which the phone was pulled out. Shortly after, the passenger plane made an emergency landing, and everyone on board was unharmed.
A boy’s shirt and several AirPods apparently made more spectacular landings after bursting out of the abruptly depressurized compartment.
In the northwest state of Washington, a guy by the name of Sean Bates discovered an iPhone on the side of the road that seemed to belong to one of the passengers during a search for wreckage.
A photo of the device posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday showed the intact screen and an emailed $70 baggage receipt. The battery is shown charged to 44 percent and the smartphone remains on 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.
In a follow up TikTok post, Bates said he’d found the phone “pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush.”
When Bates called the National Transportation Safety Board, they informed him that the phone was the second one from the flight to be discovered.
In response to his post on X, NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy thanked him and suggested they meet.
“We’ll look through [the phones] and then return them,” Homendy told reporters at a Sunday briefing. He also said it was “very, very fortunate” that the incident had not resulted in a disaster.
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.
