GoKawiilDhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
TL;DR An iPhone 17 Pro survived a 3,600-foot (1.1km) fall after being sucked out of a small airplane over Canada.
Its owners tracked it with Find My and recovered it virtually undamaged from a canola field.
The incident adds to a growing list of remarkable smartphone survival stories over the years.
The latest story comes from Saskatchewan, Canada, where artist Heather Cline was photographing the landscape from a small Cessna aircraft while her husband, David Stanchuk, piloted the plane. As Cline leaned toward the aircraft’s photography window, an airflow caught her new iPhone 17 Pro and pulled it straight out of its lanyard case.
Within seconds, the phone was tumbling roughly 1.1 kilometers (3,600 feet) toward the ground below.
After landing, the couple turned to Apple’s Find My feature to narrow down the phone’s location before driving to a nearby canola field. Cline expected to find a shattered phone buried somewhere among the crops. Instead, the iPhone 17 Pro was lying face up against a few strands of canola, looking almost untouched. Even more remarkably, it was still fully functional.
Germain Wilson/CBC Flight plan of the couple's plane is displayed on the iPhone that fell to the ground.
As incredible as the outcome sounds, there’s a surprisingly simple explanation. During long falls, flat objects such as smartphones tend to stabilize as air resistance slows them down. A soft landing surface, like crops or soil, also absorbs far more impact than concrete or asphalt, greatly improving the odds of survival.
Of course, none of this means your phone will survive a similar accident. Most won’t. But every once in a while, a story like this comes along and reminds us that modern smartphones can be far tougher than their spec sheets suggest.
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