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IPhone 4 Survives 1,000 Foot Fall From Plane
tekgoblin writes "From the article: 'US Air Force Combat controller Ron Walker had lost his iPhone 4 from his aircraft during flight. He works as a Jump Master, which is where he would ensure the airplane was in the correct position when he sends parachute jumpers out. The plane was moving at 150 mph and while looking out the door of the plane to find necessary ground landmarks his pocket opened and his iPhone flew out. When he noticed his phone fell, he thought all was lost. Upon landing and sharing the story with friends he installed the Find My iPhone app on one of their phones and went looking for his phone. He expected it to be battered from the fall but found the phone to be 100% un-damaged from the fall. The phone was protected by a Griffin Motif TPU iPhone case but it isn't clear whether the case protected the phone from the fall or the fact that it was cushioned by the brush that it hit.'"
The pilot was holding it wrong.
That either makes the iPhone really cool or really lucky
My old iPhone 4 shattered in a 3-foot fall from my pocket to the concrete... The new one hasn't had a scratch on it since, though.
That WAS the article, minus the last sentence.
So we know now that the iPhone 4 can survive a 1000ft fall as long as it doesnâ(TM)t hit concrete, I wonder if Apple will talk about this at one of their next iPhone announcements.
There, now you've read the entire article.
I always knew that the Chinese manufacture the best equipment in the world.
I would love to see the accelerometer and gyroscope readouts on that thing during the fall. Too bad it probably doesn't log that info while in sleep.
Big deal, I've lost my Nokia E51 from 4000 feet during parachute operations, same situation, fell into a bush. Only found it because of the anti-theft GPS Tracking software on it.
But can your iPhone survive the building it's in being blown up by an RPG? The original Gameboy has. It still plays Tetris to this day.
Because mine didn't survive the 4 ft fall from my hand to the kitchen floor.
Once the phone falls far enough to reach terminal velocity (not more than a few feet) It doesn't actually matter if its 1000 ft or 5 beyond that point, the Phone is falling as fast as it's ever going to. Headline should read "iPhone can survive fall if broken by vegetation" But that won't sell as many "Griffin Motif TPU iPhone cases" will it ) Nice name drop though!
I'll probably get modded down for this but I can't help it. I am in a giddy mood today.
INTO brush. Isn't this going to be true of most gadgets with no moving parts?
An old laptop of mine resisted a car collision, but the screen cracked one time it fell ONE FOOT HIGH from the ground (and flat).
There is some sort of law in electronics that makes a gentle caress the most common cause of electronics death. You can shot devices with a shotgun and not do as much damage as treating it with care.
.. dropped calls.
(Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week. If you're unlucky).
Small objects have proportionately more drag for their weight so their terminal velocity may not be that fast, reached earlier (so overheight doesn't matter) and damage less.
Another case of why there are no flying pigs -- weight increases as the cube of length, while drag increases as the square. So lots of flying bugs.
Only means that he got lucky that his phone survived the fall. Could had been any phone. Just like any phone that is dropped 4-5ft has a chance of surviving or not. This is just irrelevant news.
WOW , now it's got super-powers! Is there anything it can't do?!!!
Apple! IPhone! Apple! IPhone! Apple! Apple! Apple! IPhone! IPhone! IPhone! Apple IPhone!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'd be more interested if Flight Safety contacted him about improperly securing dangerous FOD.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
all of which belies the fact that the phone is made by Foxconn, one of China's better known purveyors of junk.
Would that it weren't so.
Like the inimitable Groucho Marx, I would never join a club that would have me as a member.
The phone was protected by a Griffin Motif TPU iPhone case but it isn’t clear whether the case protected the phone from the fall or the fact that it was cushioned by the brush that it hit.'"
With any luck the brush it hit was a Taliban guy's pubic hair.
I guess these guys are not CSI, or even scientist for that matter.... ....
>or the fact that it was cushioned by the brush that it hit
Of course if you found it in the bush, then it was cushioned, as anyone knows that some material to cushion the fall takes some of the impact away from the object, and that means as well that it landed on grass or dirt underneath, and not pure cement (i never seen a brush grow in the middle of a street)....so again another reason why it was ok, I am glad that his iphone is ok, as I have one, and could not live without it, but get a clue, it was not apple or the cell phone, it was the environment it landed in,
If you really want a test.., try letting it fall from the plane into water, then go find it, then tell me that it is not wet, and its a miracle, then i will praise apple for creating the perfect phone, until then....
While my physics is a bit rusty, I believe G-Force is a objects acceleration relative to free fall. So I am going with zero G's
Would that give the highest n900fly score OF ALL TIME?
http://maemo.org/packages/view/n900fly/
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Well you definitely made a mistake there somewhere. You can't go from freefall speeds to a standstill with 0 Gs deceleration.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...but AT&T still sucks moose cock.
My physics is rusty, if not non-existent, but I would guess 1 G.
I believe it was saved by the rush of apple users that threw themselves on the ground to cushion its fall.
Yea that would make a bit of sense wouldn't it? =)
After learning that they are made in the same factory and with the same parts as Toshibas, this does not surprise me.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
it wasn't raining at the time though.
You missed your chance to make one hell of a "The Gods Must Be Crazy" reference.
Would make for an awesome episode, though.
There's an app for that!
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
That takes 'will it blend' to a new level. Someone make a website, quick!
Requiem for the American Dream
Just goes to show you, you cannot break a piece of crap.
No, but it's density is about 2.18 g/cm3 - more than twice that of a human body. A flailing human hits Vt around 125 mph, so I think it's safe to assume somewhere upwards of that.
It would read 1G after it had hit the ground (stationary lying on the ground), but during the impact, it would be far more than that. It would read 0G during freefall (as this is the definition of freefall). The deceleration as it hits the ground would be very high, (possibly even as much as 100G+) because the time to decelerate is so small, and the distance over which it decelerates is tiny.
If you're going to drop an iPhone 1000 feet, aim for a bush.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I thought it was still law that all mobile phones had to be turned off whilst on board an aircraft, in which case how could he have found his phone by tracking it?
Dammit! Somebody finally gets the right answer and I'm all out of mod points.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Of course, this is neglecting air-resistance, which I'm not sure is a valid assumption. Nevermind.
Explains why the Knights wanted a shrubbery. How Monty Python knew about iPhones back then is anybody's guess though...
-Space for rent
There are plenty of cases where people survived falls of 20,000 feet or more so I really don't see this as impressive.
He's a jump master. That means he was probably in something like a C-130. A jump master is typically the last guy you see before you jump out of an aircraft.
It makes it very easy to find American Soldiers, so they can blow them up, etc.. -Andrew
This is fine and good, but to see what normally happens when you drop an iPhone out of a plane, we should be statistically rigorous. Is it possible to get a grant to drop 40 (or more) iPhones from a plane? And as long as we are doing that, how about getting a few different models of Android and Windows phones (again in a sufficiently large numbers) and sending them all plummeting to the ground in one big, glorious shower of technology?
This isn't news. About 6 months ago, a boy & his father sent an iphone up up and away... it reached the upper atmosphere and the cold finally popped the balloon. The iphone fell... from much further up than just 100 wimpy ft. Here's the vid - http://vimeo.com/15091562 I thought everybody knew about this.
Well see, that's how it survived then. The phone was probably a 3G model so 1G would have not affect on it.
I had left it on top of the car and forgot. It flew off into the road at some point and was picked up by a thankfully very honest person. Again, not a scratch. I believe this was one positive result of the monolithic design of the iPhone, in that it remained in on piece as it impacted. Another phone with a removable battery would have probably been in pieces scattered all over creation.
Cheers
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Anyone know the tumbling terminal velocity of an iPhone? After a certain height it's all the same (until you start getting high enough that the iPhone will burn up in the atmosphere).
(monty)An African or European iPhone? (/monty)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
I realize that military attire regulations have changed to allow personnel to carry their pagers/phones, but seriously why did this idiot have a cell phone during training exercises?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Is the brush ok?!
Stupid typo - 'no affect'.....
And there he was, peacefully sunbathing naked on his belly, and then this!
A flailing human hits Vt around 125 mph
Isn't this oddly specific.
There are large animals that can fly. In the time of the dinosaurs, there were Pterosaurs with 33ft wingspans
... for the next time I need to decide which phone to throw out of a flying airplane.
You would need to perform controlled tests under identical conditions to decide which is the more durable in reality. Please post the results on YouTube.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
They must be really scary then.
The Gs will change through the flight
When it initially starts falling air resistance will be negligable and it will experiance approximately 0G
As it approaches terminal velocity and stops accelerating the G-force experianced will increase tending back towards 1G
When it hits the ground things get complex
After it has settled on the ground it will experiance 1G
During hitting the ground is where things get really complex. A simple model assuming that the objects are rigid and that "contact forces" appear instantlygives a result of infinite acceleration and therefore infinite Gs. In reality different parts of the object will experiance different Gs as the object deforms on impact.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Man I really needed to know how "rugged" the iPhone is! I'm so excited I could cry!
But terminal velocity is not about density.
Roughly speaking terminal velocity is proportional to weight and inversely proportional to area perpendicular to the falling direction. This means that smaller objects tend to fall slower
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
"but it isn’t clear whether the case protected the phone from the fall or the fact that it was cushioned by the brush that it hit"
What, the brush was moving too? It (actively) hit the iPhone 4? That's one Fandroid bush!
I've dropped my (naked / unprotected) iPhone 4 from a height of roughly 5 feet onto a concrete sidewalk, and it's not even scuffed.
YMMV...
Stupid typo - 'no effect'.....
FTFY
Move sig now.
"He was just trying to get a good signal"
It was the darnedest thing. The iPhone4 landed on a barstool in a bar.
Their they're doing there hair.
Once it reaches terminal velocity, it would be at 1G again. Then it would hit the ground.
Too bad the workers who plummet to their deaths at the iPhone factory aren't similarly protected...
Goddamned slashvertisements... of COURSE if something has a soft landing it's not going to explode into a million pieces. Terminal velocity and stopping distance are the deciding factors. There are numerous documented cases of aircraft pilots and gunners surviving 15000+ foot drops onto snow or foliage with little more than a sprain or minor fractures, which can happen just the same from a 10 foot fall onto a hard surface.
Like the saying goes, it's not the fall that kills you, it's how you stop.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Terminal velocity is calculated as sqrt((2*w)/(rho*A*Cd)). .07 ft**2 .75
w = weight
rho = about 1.22 kgm**3
A = Things fall in the orientation that causes the most air resistance (believe it or not) so that's the face area, about
Cd = Coefficient of drag for a rectangle is about
So terminal velocity is about 50 MPH.
I wonder if one day, someone will invent a bike that has an engine and can reach this sort of speed...
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
Gotta love that a Jump Master didn't have the sense to secure his phone properly, huh?
If he was an Army JM he'd have that thing on a dummy cord, like everything else!
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
will it blend? That's what I thought
Thanks to Stumble Upon, once upon a time I ran across a cartoon talking about cell phone falls. Sure it can fall 1000 ft. It be thrown off of a skyscraper, it can survive reentry from space without a scratch. But if it falls off a 3 foot counter top, it shatters into millions of pieces. Moral of the story, drop it from a plane, don't drop it trying to put it back in your pocket.
But terminal velocity is not about density.
Roughly speaking terminal velocity is proportional to weight and inversely proportional to area perpendicular to the falling direction. This means that smaller objects tend to fall slower
It's not about density, but absent a proper coefficient of drag it's the best tool I have at my disposal. The latter half of this comment, that smaller objects tend to fall slower, is not correct. Given two objects of equal mass and proportional shape, the smaller will have a higher terminal velocity - they have equal acceleration due to mass, but unequal deceleration due to drag (favoring the smaller).
Ours! If you make something twice as big (any similar length dimension), it will be 2^3 = 8 times heavier. Essentially assuming a constant composite density.
Given two objects of equal mass and proportional shape, the smaller will have a higher terminal velocity
Given two objects of equal density and proportional shape the smaller will have lower terminal velocity because perpendicular area goes with the square of dimension and volume goes with the cube of dimension.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Doesn't it depend on if it's a 3G iPhone?
Or that all phones should have inch thick plastic and rubberized surrounds so that the people who drop their phones onto concrete or bus floors can do so with confidence.
The 'Ikky Ikky Ikky ptang' is a two part harmony at the end.
No single person can say it.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
wouldn't it be at some fraction of 1g if it's approaching the ground?
You do realize that iphones are heavy little bastards? It'd be like dropping a brick.
Nobody's calculated the terminal velocity of an iPhone 4 yet?
Slashdot, you're getting sad in your old age...
The saying is spelled the following way according to the "script" subtitles available on the collector's edition DVD: "Ekke Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Boing Zow Zing!"
Wikipedia
Or that all phones should have inch thick plastic and rubberized surrounds so that the people who drop their phones onto concrete or bus floors can do so with confidence.
Better solution is for all of your people who love dropping your phones to practice up on your football/soccer skills.
Though I've noticed that my iphone does not stay on those rubbery non-slip sheets, that seem to hold anything else just fine.