Did we really need something else to worry about??? (Part Two.)

Just yesterday I was doing my not-so-friendly-skies fretting about the lack of air traffic controllers.

Today, it's windows - or doors, or kinda-sorta doors - popping open. (Note to self: never sit in a window seat next to one of those kinda-sorta doors, and keep that seatbelt buckled.)

Frankly, this is something that, in all my years of flying, I've never worried about. 

Not that I shouldn't have been worried about it. 

In 1989, a door blew off a United Airlines flight, sucking nine passengers out the hole. What a ghastly way to go, but I'm guessing that the death would be pretty instantaneous.

In the 1989 case, the plane was a Boeing 747. In the most recent incident, which was on a Alaska Airline flight, it was a Boeing 737 Max 9.

Fortunately, in the recent incident no one was sucked into oblivion. One passenger's shirt was ripped off his body but - thanks to his having his seatbelt on - he didn't follow it.

One of the reasons no one was sucked out the door was that the seats in that row were empty. As my friend (and Pink Slip regular) Valerie noted in an email, "When was the last time you were on a domestic flight that had two empty seats near a window .. or anywhere?"

Good point.

The blown out door follows other problems for the 737 Max line, which is Boeing's best seller.

In 2018-2019, 737's were involved in two fatal crashes in which nearly 350 people were killed. Boeing lost billions, and all kinds of questions about the company's commitment to quality and reliability were raised. 

And now this.

The entire situation is, of course, a fiasco for Boeing. Financial. Employee morale. Marketing. 

Boeing's stock price has plummeted.

Whether they were directly involved in design or production of the 737 Max 9's, Boeing employees have to feel terrible.

And I'm guessing that there are plenty of airlines rethinking the orders they've placed for 737's - a complete sales and marketing nightmare. How'd you like to be a Boeing salesperson in negotiations for a big sale, or about to go knocking on an airline's door. Or a marketing professional working on a new campaign. Who needs a reliable airplane, anyway? Yowza. 

But one company with wares that played a minor role in the Alaska Airlines' debacle is coming out looking pretty good, and that's Apple. After all, along with the teenaged boy's shirt, a passenger's iPhone was also sucked out the hole in the fuselage. And it survived a 16,000 foot plummet to the ground, where it was found in Portland, Oregon.

The iPhone was lying on the ground, in airplane mode, with its battery half full. The screen, fully intact, showed a $70 receipt for two checked bags on Alaska Airlines flight 1282. (Source: Washington Post)

The phone was found by fellow who posted about it on Twitter. Another phone that was on flight 1282 is also in the hands of the National Transportation Safety Board, but there's no word on what type of phone it is, and whether it, too, survived the fall. Whether Phone #2 was an iPhone or not really doesn't matter. An iPhone survived a 16,000 foot fall! 

This would no doubt surprise many smartphone owners, iPhone or other, given that "nearly anyone who’s owned a smartphone has had the experience of dropping one and cracking the screen." (Been there/done that.)

No one (including iPhone marketers - so far anyway) is claiming that this translates into the survival superiority of the iPhone. 

Here's what the iPhone user guide says:

“Handle iPhone with care. It is made of metal, glass, and plastic and has sensitive electronic components inside...the iPhone or its battery can be damaged if dropped, burned, punctured, or crushed, or if it comes in contact with liquid.”

The iPhone survived not due to any special design, but thanks to physics.

...though smartphone screens have become a lot stronger over the years, this phone’s survival is most likely because of physics.

“The basic answer is air resistance,” said Duncan Watts, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Oslo. “I think the counterintuitive thing here is that an iPhone falling from the sky doesn’t end up moving that quickly because of air resistance.”

Any object falling through toward Earth will reach a point, known as its terminal velocity, where the force of gravity can’t accelerate it anymore because of resistance from the air in the atmosphere.

“If the phone is falling with its screen facing the ground, there’s quite a lot of drag, but if the phone is falling straight up and down, there’s quite a bit less,” Watts said. “In reality, the phone would be tumbling quite a bit, and get quite a lot of wind essentially giving an upward force.”

That's about enough physics for any one post. I also read that it helped that the tumbling iPhone may have had its fall broken by landing on a bush, and from there, soft ground, and not the pavement. 

Still, it's interesting to think about what iPhone marketers could make of its survival. Here's what my friend Valerie - a highly successful, long-experienced tech marketing professional - had to say:

...the  iPhone that fell 16,000 feet landing unphased and uncracked fully operational? Visions of 'takes a lickin and keeps on tickin' [a long-ago Timex ad campaign] or an ape using a samsonite suitcase like a jungle gym ...

I could only imagine what happy dance the marketeers at Apple did on hearing the news. Talk about campaigns that write themselves... Never mind all the people who've tanked their iphones by a dip in the toilet or a 3 foot slip to the floor.

As a committed non-Apple person, I usually don't pay much (if any) attention to iPhone ads. But I'll be on the lookout for any ads showing the iPhone being sucked out the hole in an airplane. (Which should, of course, include the David Bowie music from The Man Who Fell to Earth.)

Still, the issue of the day isn't the survival of the plummeting iPhone. It's the worrisome issue of getting sucked out a hole in the fuselage of a Boeing 737 Max 9...As if we need something else to worry about.

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Thank you, Valerie, oh content queen, for your timely and crucial contribution to Pink Slip.