189
iPhone survives 16,000 foot drop from Alaska Airlines flight where panel ripped off
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2024
189 points (85.9% liked)
News
23404 readers
4690 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Okay i dont completely understand it, but i think i get the gist of it. But i grew up hearing the what if of throwing marbles and pennies off a skyscraper killing people cause of the falling velocity. I assume thats not correct then?
It doesnt really add up in my mind. How doesnt any object gain more speed as it falls, ive read stories of people dieing by being struck by falling debris. Im less confused on the velocity thing and more confused on how if a phone falling 16000 feet were to hit someone in the head theyd be fine, but if it hit some grass then the item itself would be okay.
Its cool to be downvoted for being ignorant, but id think people would be a bit understanding because it just doesnt seem to make sense to me. And i at least admit that.
Totally respect you for saying you don't get it. Way better to admit what you don't know.
In a vacuum, you would be correct that things falling to earth would just keep accelerating until they hit the ground. But we have air which slows things down. Everything that falls in earths atmosphere reaches it's terminal velocity if it falls from a high enough height.
One way to think of it is to think about how anything falling in air has to push the air below it out of the way to fall. If I just jump out of a plane, I'm going to accelerate to a velocity that will likely kill me. Now if I bring a parachute, I'm bringing more weight, but I'm also able to push against a lot more air and the amount of air I push against will slow me enough that even though I'm still falling, my terminal velocity is low enough that I can survive.
The more air something can push against in comparison to it's mass, the lower it's terminal velocity. That being said everything falling in our atmosphere will reach a point where gravity can't pull it through the air resistance any faster. The force of gravity and air resistance are balanced. That is it's terminal velocity.
But there is a lot less air high up in the sky, so wouldnt it speed up untill it got closer to the ground where the air resistance kicks in. Or is 16000 feet not as high as i think it is. I know things in space keep accelerating because of the lack of air and burn up. But maybe its just the scale of things that I'm not wrapping my head around. I apologize for asking stupid questions. It just seems crazy a phone can survive that drop.
That is true the atmosphere is less dense at high altitudes. But 16,000 feet is really not that high up. Humans can still breathe without oxygen at that altitude (not well but well enough). Short answer is the phone didn't fall from a high enough hight to burn up. And as things fall they fall into denser air so the air pushes on them and slows them down.
As a comparison
Hell we are all still learning the only way to ask hard questions to ask all the easy ones first
This article has a chart of oxygen % at varying attitudes, which I thought was interesting.
https://milehightraining.com/altitude-to-oxygen-chart/
There's roughly half the oxygen there vs sea level, and is the height of the everest base camp, where you don't need supplied oxygen.
No clue if half oxygen means half everything else in the air though.