If you’ve been following global news, the recent incident involving Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 may have caught your attention. While ascending to its cruising altitude on a domestic route from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California, the Boeing 737 Max 9 experienced a startling event: a fuselage panel spontaneously detached, leading to a rapid loss of cabin pressure and the ejection of various items into the open air.
Among the items flung from the aircraft was an iPhone, fortuitously discovered by Seanathan Bates, a game designer and .NET application developer, during a casual stroll. Without hesitation, he turned the device over to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), currently conducting an inquiry into the incident.
Remarkably, the recovered iPhone not only contained an email from Alaska Airlines detailing a baggage receipt for Flight 1282 but also exhibited resilience despite the circumstances. The force of the panel blowout had severed the charging plug, leaving it broken-off, yet the iPhone itself remained unscathed.
While we’ve witnessed numerous drop tests over time, none compare to this extraordinary survival story – an iPhone enduring ejection from an airplane cruising at approximately 16,000 feet (nearly 5,000 meters). Though employing this incident in Apple’s advertising would raise ethical concerns, it undeniably underscores the device’s remarkable durability.
The peculiar occurrence of a fuselage panel blowing out mid-air turns out to be no random event. For Boeing 737 Max 9 models with extra seating, other airlines, unlike Alaska Airlines, are obligated to include additional emergency exit doors. In the incident at hand, the panel that blew out was precisely in the location where one of these doors would have been.
Boeing’s cost-effective solution for airlines with fewer seats, such as Alaska Airlines, was to replace the door with a permanent plug – the very component that detached. This revelation seems more than a mere coincidence. As the NTSB’s investigation is in its early stages, we eagerly await the findings to shed light on this extraordinary occurrence.
