This is called airplane mode - an iPhone that fell 5,000 meters from an Alaska Airlines flight landed without a single crack in the screen and even with a half-charged battery.
The phone was sucked out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Friday when a fuselage panel tore off and left a hole. Soon after, the passenger plane made an emergency landing with everyone on board safe.
Several items, reportedly including AirPods and a boy's shirt, made a more dramatic landing after being launched from the suddenly depressurized lounge.
While searching for debris, a man named Shawn Bates in northwest Washington State found an iPhone on the side of the road that appeared to belong to one of the passengers.
A photo of the device posted on X shows the screen intact and the emailed baggage claim for $70. The battery is shown to be charged to 44% and the smartphone remains in airplane mode.
Aside from the port where the charger tip sticks out after being severed from the rest of the cable, the phone appears intact.
In a subsequent TikTok post, Bates said he found the phone "pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush."
Bates said he contacted the National Transportation Safety Board, where they told him it was the second phone recovered from the flight.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Hommendi responded to his X post, thanking him and offering to meet.
At a briefing on Sunday, Khomendi told reporters that "we will examine [the phones] and then return them," adding that it was "very, very lucky" that the incident did not end in tragedy.
In response to the incident, regulators quickly grounded some versions of Boeing's 737 MAX 9 plane pending inspections. Boeing shares fell in trading. /BGNES
