A Canadian artist dropped her iPhone 17 Pro from a plane at 3,600 feet, then found it sitting face-up and virtually untouched in a canola field. Here's why this is more common than you'd think.

Heather Cline, a mixed-media artist from Saskatchewan, Canada, routinely takes to the skies with her husband, David, in their small plane. The goal is to gain inspiration for her artwork, which often depicts the Canadian landscape from aerial perspectives.

Recently, during an outing above Regina, Heather decided to use her new iPhone 17 Pro to help gather inspiration for a new project. Her husband wasn't so sure about her choice.

"I had ordered a grip for it that would make it feel more like a traditional camera but it hadn't come yet," Heather says in a video posted to CBC's Instagram account. "And it was a great day for flying."

Heather settled on wearing a lanyard-style case around her neck. Unfortunately, while attempting to take the perfect shot, she inadvertently passed her phone through an airstream, which sucked it out of its case and out of the plane from more than 3,600 feet.

Thinking quickly, David prompted Heather to look for the device with Find My. The pair got a rough idea of where the phone landed and decided to track it down once they landed.

Sure enough, Heather was reunited with her iPhone. And even better: it had miraculously survived the fall and was found unscathed in a canola field.

"I go up, and I think it's gonna be buried in the dirt, smashed, crazy," Heather recalls. "I literally look down, the phone's sitting there, face-up, just up against few strands of canola. And it's like, pristine."

Heather ends the video by laughing and saying that she'll not be making the same mistake twice and plans on making sure her iPhone is secure before she takes to the skies again.

"Maybe we'll cable tie it to my hand," she jokes.

"Not a bad idea," Dave chimes in.

Free falling

While it might seem improbable that an iPhone could survive a fall from a plane, it's actually not that far-fetched. It's not even the first time we've heard this story.

Flat objects, like an iPhone, typically stabilize to fall "flat" fairly quickly during particularly long falls. Not only does this slow the phone down dramatically, it also puts it in the most ideal positioning for impact.

If you've ever dropped your phone from a short distance, you'll know it can be devastating. That destruction is due, in part, because it usually doesn't fall flat. Edge impacts, especially those on the corners, are far more devastating.

There isn't enough time for the phone to rotate to flat, so all of the force from the fall can be delivered to a corner or edge. Less area of impact, means all that force is delivered to a small area, very quickly.

So, if you're wondering why Heather's iPhone survived a 3,600-foot drop into a crop, and yours broke from four feet onto carpet or concrete, you can blame the physics of aerodynamics and complex impact physics for that.

We're not going to write 5000 words on this. Not today, at least, so let's make it simple.

After some discussions we've had with the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, some case manufacturers, and Apple over the years, we know that a phone reaches maximum velocity, that is notably lower than terminal velocity of a spherical object falling in a vacuum, after about a 335-foot fall.

A six-foot iPhone fall impacts the surface it hits at about half the speed of that 335-foot fall. And, since it hasn't time had to flatten out on the short fall, a corner or edge impact is far likelier.

Also, the landing surface matters. Concrete stops the phone instantly, causing an immediate energy transfer. Grass or dirt cushions the blow by extending the stopping time, which drastically lowers the peak impact force.

In the case of airplane drops, it seems that more often than not, the fallen iPhones land on fields or grass, rather than a building, sidewalk, or road. And, they nearly always land on the front or back of the phone, rather than a corner, spreading the force of the fall over a larger surface.

All this contributes to why an iPhone can improbably survive a fall from 3,600 feet. Even if it wasn't in a case.

It still takes a massive engineering effort to crash-proof an iPhone, and we don't want to dismiss that. But there are reasons why iPhones can fall from a great distance and survive, while not surviving a short fall.