iPhone survives 5,000m fall from Alaska Airlines' Boeing 737 Max 9 flight

WASHINGTON: Now that's what you call airplane mode - an iPhone plummeted 5,000m from the Alaska Airlines flight in a mid-air incident, but landed without a single crack in the screen and even a battery still half-charged.

The phone was sucked out of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 on Friday (Jan 5) when a fuselage panel blew off the Boeing 737 Max 9, leaving a gaping hole. The passenger plane made an emergency landing shortly after, with all aboard safe.

A few items, reportedly including AirPods and a boy's shirt, made more dramatic landings after shooting out of the suddenly depressurised cabin.

Amid a search for debris, a man named Sean Bates in the northwestern state of Washington found an iPhone on the side of the road, appearing to belong to one of the passengers.

SMARTPHONE REMAINED ON FLIGHT MODE

A photo of the device posted on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday, showed the intact screen and an emailed US$70 baggage receipt. The battery is shown charged to 44 per cent and the smartphone remains in flight mode.

Aside from the port, where the terminal of the charger protrudes after being ripped from the rest of the cord, the phone appears untouched.

In a follow-up TikTok post, Bates said he'd found the phone "pretty clean, no scratches on it, sitting under a bush".

TWO PHONES FOUND FROM FLIGHT

Bates said he contacted the National Transportation Safety Board, which told him it was the second phone from the flight to have been found.

NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy replied to his post on X thanking him and offering to meet.

In a briefing on Sunday, Homendy told reporters "We'll look through (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, regulatory bodies swiftly grounded some versions of Boeing's 737 MAX 9 jet, pending inspections. Boeing shares plunged in trading on Monday.