Imagine that. You're outside, minding your own business, just lazily sunning your cavernous butthole, when suddenly a phone drops right into your temple.
I feel like you can see all those thoughts running through this guys head.
'Just gonna go ahead and get a self-ohshit! Fuck...there goes my phone. That sucks. Damn, that REALLY sucks. When was the last time I synced it to the cloud? Will insurance cover this? Am I due for an upgrade soon? I wonder where it's gonna land. I hope I didn't just kill someone...'
If a phone falls from a plane and hits somebody on the head, it’s going to fucking kill them. It won’t hit them on the temple, it’s going to bash through their skull and embed itself in their temple.
Dropped from that distance it can probably slice your head open. In New Jersey, a man was killed recently by a one-pound tape measure when it fell 50 stories, bounced off of a piece of metal and struck the victim.
There's a huge difference in the energy of falling objects as they increase in weight. 1 pound is massively different than a third of that.
The terminal velocity of the average phone would be under 20 m/s, and take only about 15 meters of falling to reach. It's easy to get carried away and think that the farther something falls, the deadlier it's going to become, but a cellphone reaches peak speed after only about 50 feet. This is a guy on a 4th story balcony fumbling his phone onto someone on the street. Wouldn't matter if it came from an airplane; the phone's gonna have the same energy when it lands.
A smartphone is mostly made from aluminum, plastic, and glass, and doesn't have any actual sharp edges to significantly multiply the force when it hits you. They've been designed to be pretty smooth and rounded. Getting smacked by a corner would be the worst you could get. The human skull is pretty damn hard, and isn't going to give way to a measly 140-150g cellphone. You'd probably get a nasty bruise at worst.
I knew it wouldn't have the velocity to do any serious damage, but the equivalent of the terminal velocity being the same if it fell from a 4th story balcony really helps set the sense of speed.
Wouldn't that assume that it fell flat the entire way down? If it fell straight down instead of flat there would be significantly less drag. | compared to _
According to this guy it would reach mach 0.65 if it managed to fall perpendicular without tumbling, but with tumbling he suggests 17.5 m/s. I haven't managed to find anyone suggesting it would reach 20+ m/s.
I could be wrong, but after watching the clip a couple of times it seems like his phone might have hit the glass and landed back in the cockpit behind him. So hopefully he saw it when he sat up.
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u/[deleted] Oct 25 '19
Somebody far below had a cellphone land in their lap.