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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
189 points (85.9% liked)
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They have terminal velocity like everything else. Really, it all depended on what those phones landed on/in.
Yes, thank you. Whether you drop it from 200 feet or 20,000 feet it's still gonna hit the ground at the exact same speed.
Idk if you forgot the /s or im stupid. I didnt think thats how that worked, but i am reading how a phone survived falling out a plane. So..... 🤷♂️
https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_velocity
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.
To clarify, if it fell from 1 foot vs. if it fell from 10 feet then it will hit the floor at very different speeds. But at some particular height the object has enough time to reach its maximum downward speed. So falling from any height above that will never make the object reach a faster fall speed.
Gravity makes the object fall faster and faster, but the quicker it moves the more air resistance it encounters from trying to squish the air out of its way (this is called drag). After a few seconds the force of gravity that's trying to pull it down is equal to the force of drag from the air not wanting to move out of the way - and at that point gravity can no longer make it fall any faster than it's already falling. We call that speed its terminal velocity, meaning the maximum speed that gravity can make an object fall through the air.
It's exactly how it works. Just look at Vesna Vulovic.
Google "terminal velocity"