Two cell phones were recovered from the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet that had an inflight explosive episode as it flew across Oregon over the weekend.
The incident occurred on Friday just as the plane was making its way to Ontario, California.
During a news conference on Sunday, National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy confirmed that the devices were recovered by residents in the area where the door plug fell from the structure.
“Some community members found a cell phone in a yard and a cell phone on the side of the road and contacted us and handed them in,” she said.
One of the devides, which appears to be an iPhone, still appeared to be completely intact and functional after it dropped from 16,000 feet in the sky. The cell phone still had part of a charger attached to it.
One of those residents appeared to have posted his discovery to X, formerly Twitter, writing, “found an iPhone on the side of the road… Still in airplane mode with half a battery and open to baggage claim for #AlaskaAirlines ASA1282.”
To clarify, if it fell from 1 foot vs. if it fell from 10 feet then it will hit the floor at very different speeds. But at some particular height the object has enough time to reach its maximum downward speed. So falling from any height above that will never make the object reach a faster fall speed.
Gravity makes the object fall faster and faster, but the quicker it moves the more air resistance it encounters from trying to squish the air out of its way (this is called drag). After a few seconds the force of gravity that’s trying to pull it down is equal to the force of drag from the air not wanting to move out of the way - and at that point gravity can no longer make it fall any faster than it’s already falling. We call that speed its terminal velocity, meaning the maximum speed that gravity can make an object fall through the air.