This iPhone 6s Fell Out of an Airplane and Lived to Tell About It

While we already know that the iPhone 12 is one tough cookie, thanks to multiple professional drop tests and the new Ceramic Shield glass, the reality is that Apple’s iPhones have been remarkably durable for years, as a recent survival story of an iPhone 6s demonstrates.

As reported by Brazil’s G1 (Google Translate and shared by 9to5Mac, documentary filmmaker, Ernesto Galiotto recently dropped his iPhone 6s from a height of about 300 metres (~1,000 feet) while in a moving airplane, and yet eventually managed to recover it intact, thanks to both the durability of Apple’s design and the Find My feature.

While dropping your iPhone out of a plane may be one of the most unusual ways to lose one, it’s still nothing that Apple’s GPS location features can’t handle, assuming of course the device remains operational enough to keep sending out its location, which Galiotto’s iPhone 6s did.

Naturally, from a height of around 1,000 metres, it would be difficult to know exactly where the device had landed, but Galiotto, who has been flying over the region for 26 years, was determined to recover his lost device.

It is something that, if you tell someone, the person does not believe. It was a God help us! At the moment, I even spoke with a bad word, but then I thought and said: “I’m going to recover this cell phone.”

Ernesto Galiotto, environmentalist and documentary filmmaker (via Google Translate)

Galiotto’s flight in this case was over the area of Praia do Peró, in the Lakes Region of Rio de Janeiro, in a flyby intended to commemorate the renewal of the International Blue Flag Seal to recognize the environmental quality of the beach. While the full flag ceremony itself was cancelled due to concerns with the COVID pandemic, Galiotto made the flight anyway, joking that “as the flag did not go up, the cell phone fell.”

Although Galiotto lost his iPhone on Friday, he wasn’t able to go searching for it until early the next morning, after discovering that it was still broadcasting its location. Using the Find My app on a friend’s iPhone, Galiotto was able to track it down in a sandbank in Dunas do Peró.

We walked for about 5 minutes until we got close to the cell phone. It was in a region of sand, with the screen facing downwards. The brightness of the sun reflected on the cover, and I was soon able to identify in the middle of the sand. it seems, it was intact, working perfectly, with only a part of the protective film of the screen cracked.

Ernesto Galiotto (via Google Translate)

What was even more remarkable is that when Galiotto located his iPhone, it was not only basically undamaged, but since he had been recording video when he dropped it, the iPhone 6s had captured its entire descent, which lasted for about 15 seconds, and continued filming for about an hour and half afterwards, while sitting face down in the sand. Galiotto also noted that the iPhone still had a 16% charge remaining when he found it the next day, so it’s unclear why the recording ultimately stopped — perhaps it simply ran out of storage.

Galiotto also recorded a video at the moment at which he found the iPhone, commenting on how it was found “here in the middle of nature,” connecting it to his own mission to help protect the environment and something that Apple, with its own strong focus on environmental initiatives, should also be proud of.

The full report, including the videos captured by Galiotto’s iPhone 6s, can be found on Globo’s G1 news portal.