It is “not super far fetched,” consultants say, “because impacts are complicated”
It’s not frequent for airplanes to lose a door midair and but land safely. That’s what occurred to Alaska Airlines 1282, which landed in Portland, Oregon. However wonders by no means stop.
In a viral publish, X person Seanathan Bates documented how he had discovered an iPhone on the side of the road that got here from an Alaska Airways passenger and had seemingly survived the 16,000-foot drop “perfectly intact.”
As Bates later added, there’s some nuance to how intact the machine could have been, however “the screen didn’t have any damage.”
In an e-mail to TechCrunch, the U.S. Nationwide Transportation Security Board confirmed that it wasn’t only one machine, however “two cell phones likely from the flight” that had been recovered and turned over to Alaska Airways. Essentially the most putting element is that “they were both functioning iPhones.”
How is it doable {that a} smartphone might survive such a large fall, when there are folks strolling round with shattered screens from a lot smaller incidents? “Many readers reacted to Bates’s post by quipping that their phones had broken after falls of only a few feet,” the Guardian observed.
However whereas many people are flabbergasted, consultants aren’t.
“Impacts are complicated”
Certainly one of these consultants is Rhett Allain, an affiliate professor of physics and blogger who additionally runs a YouTube channel, Dot Physics. Right here’s the primary half of his rationalization:
It’s doable your cellphone might break in the event you drop it from 3 toes however not from 1,000 toes. Why? It’s as a result of impacts are sophisticated. Suppose you drop your cellphone off the desk and it lands on one thing laborious. Since laborious issues don’t “give” through the collision, there might be a really quick impression time. A brief impression time would require a bigger drive to cease it. It’s this bigger drive that may make the cellphone break.
Wait. It will get even worse. Think about you drop your cellphone out of your pocket and it lands on a tiny rock. Now the impression drive might be giant (similar to hitting the ground) and the impression space could be very small. This implies the strain on impression might be excessive (strain = drive / space). That is completely different from the cellphone touchdown flat on a flat floor with a bigger impression space.
Since iFixIt is known for its restore guides, CEO and self-described fixer Kyle Wiens additionally is aware of a factor or two about damaged units. So not solely was he not stunned {that a} flying iPhone made it unscathed; he additionally knew that this wasn’t the first time. Therefore his response: “I wouldn’t say this is super far fetched!”
Wiens made the identical level as Allain on impacts. “It looks like [the iPhone] landed on dirt instead of concrete, which I’m sure helped a lot.” However each of them additionally identified one other issue: terminal velocity.
Two forces, one cellphone
“The terminal velocity of an iPhone is slower than you’d think. Air resistance limits the maximum speed, so it’s not necessarily going any faster falling from 18,000 feet than 1,000 feet,” Wiens defined.
Allain went right into a bit extra element together with his physics professor hat on:
“As a phone falls over a greater distance, there will be two forces acting on it. The gravitational force pulls down and there is also an upwards pushing air resistance force. This air resistance increases in magnitude as the phone moves faster through the air. So, at some point these two forces (gravity and air resistance) will balance and the phone will stop increasing in speed — thus moving at a constant speed.”
TL;DR: “Once the phone reaches terminal velocity, it doesn’t matter how high up it fell from.”
This takes us again to why a display screen will typically shatter after a fall, and typically not. It’s the mix of terminal velocity and the floor it lands on that determines whether or not or not the cellphone will break down. Rather more than top. And undoubtedly greater than whether or not airplane mode was on!
