Apple recently received some free advertising from an iPhone 13 Pro Max user who dropped his handheld while skydiving at 14,000 feet, only to find it in perfect working order on the ground.
Last month, Casey Flay, an engineer and skydiving enthusiast from Devon, in the UK, jumped out of an airplane at 14,000 feet (4,267 meters) without closing one of the front pockets on his wingsuit, which caused his iPhone 13 Pro Max to fall out almost immediately after leaving the airplane. The GoPro camera on his helmet captured the moment on video, but before checking the footage, he was convinced he had left the phone on the plane. It was only after searching for it that he decided to use the Find My iPhone app to learn that his handheld was located about 4 miles from where he had landed. But the most shocking thing of all was that the phone still worked.
Photo: Kamil Pietrzak
“I brought my phone in my wingsuit just in case the others couldn’t find me when I landed. I left my pocket open, and from my helmet camera, you can see it sticking out,” Flay said. “It just flies off when I jump – gone. I didn’t even know it was gone; I thought I’d left it on the plane. Nobody could see it on the plane, so I used Find My iPhone and saw it was in a forest.”
After walking 30 minutes to the phone’s location, the 37-year-old engineer expected to find his handheld in pieces, or seriously roughed up, but it hardly had a mark on it, and it seemed to work just as well as before its hard landing. If anything, it worked even better, as a button that had been stuck ever since Casey had accidentally spilled a drink on it now appeared to work flawlessly.
“A couple of years ago, I was in a restaurant and spilled something on the phone. No matter how much I cleaned it out, the side button was still stuck. But now, after falling from 14,000 feet to the ground, it’s working fine,” the skydiver said. “There was not a scratch on it. It was as if it had fallen out of my pocket right there and then. It’s unbelievable. It just doesn’t happen.”
Casey’s story went viral last week, boosting the iPhone’s already strong reputation when it comes to durability, but this isn’t the first such tale we’ve covered. A couple of years ago, we wrote about a man who retrieved his iPhone 14 33 days after dropping it in the ocean, only to find it still worked perfectly, and a year prior, we wrote about an iPhone 10 that still worked after spending 10 months on the bottom of a river.
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