There are all sorts of reasons Apple doesn’t recommend that you drop your iPhone out of airplanes. But, if it does accidentally happen, you may not be totally out of luck.
A report from Brazilian news outlet G1 concerns filmmaker Ernesto Galiotto, who accidentally dropped his iPhone 6 out of a plane at a height of 984 feet. An accompanying video shows that Galiotto was trying to use the device to film over a beach 100 miles east of Rio de Janeiro, when it was whipped out of his hand and sent hurtling toward certain death.
Well, almost certain, that is!
In fact, the phone astonishingly managed to survive in apparently good condition. “It is something that, if you tell someone, they wouldn’t believe you,” Galiotto told G1.
Through a quirk of fate (or, perhaps not, since else would someone be holding their iPhone outside a plane while flying?), Galiotto was filming at the time he dropped the handset.
That means that the rapid descent of his phone was recorded. You won’t be able to gauge too much from it, though, since the falling is essentially one long strobing blur until the phone landed safely in the sand. You can watch the video on the G1 website.
Move over Bear Grylls: iPhone is the real survivalist
Needless to say, this is one of those stories that almost certainly wouldn’t be replicated if you tried to repeat the experiment hundreds of times under the exact same conditions. The fall onto a soft surface, combined with the light weight of the phone, likely helped, but there’s still plenty that could have made this a less happy (and, in turn, less remarkable) incident.
It’s not the first remarkable iPhone survival story, though. Earlier this year, an iPhone user found their phone still working after a two-month submersion in the Thames river in London. While Apple advertises the water-resistance of its iPhones as a selling point, this isn’t supposed to extend to river water for weeks at a time. Further back, in 2015, a 74-year-old Texas businessman also dropped his iPhone out of an airplane. In that case, it fell a significantly greater distance (a massive 9,300 feet), and miraculously survived.
Source: G1 Globo
