Source: AFP
Now that’s what you call airplane mode — an iPhone that plummeted 16,000 feet (5,000 meters) from an Alaska Airlines flight landed without a single crack in the screen and even a half-charged battery.
The phone was sucked from Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Friday when a fuselage panel exploded, leaving a gaping hole. The airliner made an emergency landing shortly after, with all on board safe.
Some items, reportedly including AirPods and a boy’s shirt, made more dramatic landings after being shot out of the suddenly depressurized cabin.
In the midst of searching for wreckage, a man named Shawn Bates in northwest Washington state found an iPhone on the side of the road, which appeared to belong to one of the passengers.
A photo of the device posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday showed the screen intact and a $70 baggage claim emailed to it. The battery is shown at 44 percent charge and the smartphone remains in flight mode.
![](https://images.yen.com.gh/images/100bf047feff04c3.jpg?impolicy=cropped-image&imwidth=256)
![](https://images.yen.com.gh/images/100bf047feff04c3.jpg?impolicy=cropped-image&imwidth=256)
Read also
Vinfast plans India’s first EV factory
Apart from the port, where the charger pin sticks out after being torn from the rest of the cable, the phone looks untouched.
In a subsequent TikTok post, Bates said he had found the phone “quite clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush.”
Bates said he contacted the National Transportation Safety Board, which told him it was the second phone from the flight that was found.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy responded to X’s post thanking him and offering to meet.
In a briefing on Sunday, Homendy told reporters that “We will look into it [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, regulators quickly grounded some versions of Boeing’s 737 MAX 9 jet pending inspections. Boeing shares fell in trading on Monday.
Source: AFP