This iPhone must be part Apple device, part cat. That’s the only explanation for its surviving a 2,500-foot drop out of an airplane, right? Call it fantastic engineering or just blind luck, but Jeannine Buck says her smartphone lived to tell the tale of plummeting around half a mile out of the sky.
The British Columbia resident was taking a leisurely sky cruise in a small Cessna aircraft, photographing the wonders of Vancouver’s Stanley Park below. But then, she dropped her phone out of the window, and was sure that all was lost. Though she did see the device hitting tree branches as it tumbled out of the plane, it seemed unlikely that it would be much more than twisted metal, plastic, and shattered glass by the time she retrieved it.
But boy, was she in for a surprise. Using a friend’s phone and the Find My iPhone app, she set out on a search to find her lost iPhone 5S. And thanks to her unique ringtone — Otis Redding’s (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay — she was, stunningly enough, able to not only recover her iPhone, but discover it in working condition.
“I had just changed the ringtone [that] morning from Stayin’ Alive. I’ve since changed in back in honor of the phone’s will to live,” Buck told the Abbotsford News. While the phone was minorly damaged, the screen was completely intact (no really, there’s a picture on her Facebook page to prove it), and the phone still works perfectly well.
“It was an absolute miracle,” Buck concluded.
So what has she learned from her harrowing and yet altogether miraculous experience? “I won’t be taking pictures on a plane beside an open window ever again, that’s for certain!”
If only all of us had Buck’s luck when it comes to keeping iPhones alive.
