Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ships do lose containers regularly though. New market opportunity!
How do you misplace a container?
They lose them to sea weather. It's a thing: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/01/983017153/cargo-overboard-int...
iPhone that fell from hole in Alaska 737 MAX flight is found, still open to Mail
471–475 of 475 posts
Re: iPhone that fell from hole in Alaska 737 MAX flight is found, still open to Mail
#472Earlier quoted context omitted.
Boeing doesn’t make trains. This phone fell out of the sky.
Yes, and planes stay in the sky because they travel and hundreds of miles per hour of relative ground speed. So, you would expect things that fall out of them to have a lateral velocity component in addition to their vertical one.
A jet airplane is low-drag and has thrust from its engines; a phone has neither. The phone’s downward velocity is constantly accelerated of gravity, so it will stay at terminal velocity downward. Its forward velocity begins rapidly decreasing immediately upon leaving the plane, due to air resistance. After just a few seconds, the phone will be traveling mostly-downward.
Re: iPhone that fell from hole in Alaska 737 MAX flight is found, still open to Mail
#473This isn’t surprising - there was a wired story about phones surviving from planes back in 2011 (1) The gist is that it’s a light object and due to that + broad shape, its terminal velocity is not very high. Coupled that with the mass and there’s not a lot of force on landing. Of course the phone itself is fragile so it might not take a lot of force to break. Still, as long as it lands on something soft it might be o…
Where it lands is the biggest factor. A phone will almost never break if it falls on soft grass or mud. And no phone is surviving a high velocity drop onto concrete. Angle of fall is another big one. From what I've seen phones are generally fine if they fall face up or down, but even a slight bump on the edges is enough to crack the glass.
By the looks of the tweet, high possibility of some shrubs slowing it down and absorbing some energy before it came to a stop?
Re: iPhone that fell from hole in Alaska 737 MAX flight is found, still open to Mail
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a story about that, from the movie producer Fred Zinneman. He was working on a movie and cast some paraplegics. One when asked said it was an accident, but didn't want to talk. Fred eventually got the story out of him. He had been a paratrooper in WW 2. His parachute didn't open. But he landed in a big tree. Shaken, bruised, scratched up, and so on, but basically fine. Climbing out of the tree he fell, and bro…
Nitpick: The parachute likely opened _partially_ (as is common for such malfunctions) so that impacting a tree wouldn't cause injury or death. That said, falling out of the tree checks out because that _is_ dangerous. Modern US Airborne training teaches a whole lot of caution when doing so. Best case you wait for someone to extricate you, but worst case (or for a combat jump), you deploy the reserve chute and then sl…
You might be right about the main parachute.
In WW 2, only US paratroopers had reserve chutes. This was likely a British paratrooper. So no reserve chute.
And yes. Climbing out of a tree while shaking from adrenaline is scary dangerous. But it is the sort of risk that takes experience to appreciate. In WW 2, nobody had experience.
Re: iPhone that fell from hole in Alaska 737 MAX flight is found, still open to Mail
#475My guess is, given state of the charging connector still attached but ripped off ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38914210 ): The entire thing fell out of plane (phone + charging cable plugged), then landed in a tree, where the charging cable got tangled in branches and that's when phone broke out of it and fell in grass. So phone was able to release kinetic energy in 2 big events (+a few branches hit maybe), n…
I'm surprised it didn't break past the strain relief. Everyone with an iPhone has a handful of charging cables that end up like [1]. That's where they tend to fail first. 1: https://www.engadget.com/apple-patent-application-frayed-cab...
A small piece of shrink tube fixes this. The difficult part is to squeeze it onto the connector