Losing and dropping your phone are two equally distressing experiences, so when you realise your blower may have slipped out mid-flight, you may lose all hope.
Amazingly that wasn’t the case for iPhone owner Ben Wilson, who, whilst flying in a light aircraft from Houston, Texas hadn’t realised that his smartphone had abandoned ship mid-flight, without a parachute no less.
According to Wilson and the pilot of their Beechcraft Bonanza airplane Will Warnock, a sudden change in cabin pressure during their flight back to Kickapoo Airport in Wichita Falls caused the plane’s passenger door to pop open.
The sudden rush of air pulled out a newspaper from the cabin but what Wilson hadn’t realised was that the occurrence must have also caused his iPhone 5S to slip from his pocket, sliding through the three inch gap, falling 9600 feet to terra firma.
The two only realised that the phone’s absence after touching down and searching the plane’s cabin and Wilson’s briefcase afterwards. It wasn’t until the following day that Wilson along with a work colleague; John Kidwell tried using Apple’s Find My iPhone app to locate the phone’s whereabouts, assuming it may have been left in a rental car back in Texas.
To their surprise the phone was still alive and marked its location as somewhere near Jackboro, Texas, a city some 50 miles from their current location. When they arrived in the vicinity they had to trek across a ranch road and a fence, only to find it under a mesquite tree, guided by a nearby donkey.
Aside from some scratched corners the phone was apparently unharmed and Wilson accounts its hardiness to the Mophie battery case he’d placed it into previously.
Whilst we’re not planning on testing which other phones have the potential to become the mobile equivalent of Felix Baumgartner, it’s always impressive when technology survives a scenario above and beyond any environment its creates will have likely tested for.
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