Intact iPhone found after 16K-foot plunge from Alaska Airlines flight

An iPhone remarkably survived a 16,000-foot plunge after being sucked out of the Alaska Airlines flight that lost a door plug.

Oregon resident, Sean Bates, said he was taking a stroll when he stumbled on the Apple device, which was one of two cell phones that blew out of the gaping hole on the depressurized Boeing 737 MAX 9 on Friday.

“Found an iPhone on the side of the road… Still in airplane mode with half a battery and open to a baggage claim for #AlaskaAirlines ASA128,” Bates wrote on X, where he posted an image of the phone.

“Survived a 16,000 foot drop perfectly in tact!” he added.

He said he notified the National Transportation Safety Board of his discovery and was informed that it was the second phone to be found from the flight.

“In case you didn’t see it, there was a broken-off charger plug still inside it! Thing got *yanked* out the door (Sorry I didn’t get a better pic before handing it over haha),” Bates wrote after his find on Barnes Road.

“I naturally have to assume that Airplane mode helped it survive the fall,” he added with a laughing emoji.

Bates also posted a video in which he described how he found the phone after the NTSB asked people to be on the lookout for items that may have fallen off the aircraft.

“Thankfully, no one was injured or got sucked out but they did lose some belongings. They were still looking for the door, and I found a phone sitting on the side of the road that had apparently fallen 16,000 feet,” he says.

“I was of course a little skeptical at first. I was thinking this could just be thrown out of a car,” Bates says, adding that it didn’t even have a scratch on it.

“It didn’t have a screen lock on it so I opened it up and it was in airplane mode with the travel confirmation and baggage claim for Alaska 1282. So I had to go call the NTSB,” he adds.

Social media users were amazed that the iPhone, which appeared to be in a case with the screen exposed, was unscathed.

“How is this possible? I’ve dropped my iPhone off the kitchen table and it didn’t make it,” one user wrote.

“When a person drops a phone under the seats of Rogers Arena, it takes a hard search and like an hour to find it in the mess underneath. Sometimes you can’t find it at all,” another wrote.

“Yet here two phones fall from the sky, land perfect and are found?” he added.

Bates responded: “The odds are wild especially that we found these phones before even finding the big ol’ door panel.”

The other cellphone was found in a backyard.

As of Monday morning, Bates’ post from Sunday had amassed more than 10 million views.

NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy on Sunday said the door plug was found by a school teacher, two days after the plane with 177 people aboard was forced to make an emergency landing on the flight from Portland, Oregon, to Ontario, California.

The agency earlier pleaded with residents and business owners to check any doorbell footage they might have, look in their backyards or hop onto their roofs to search for the door plug or other items from the plane.