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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
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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.