Some of us have jumped out of a plane.
The rest of us just wonder: What would it look like?
Or worse: not to jump, but to fall?
This Samsung Galaxy S5 appears — “allegedly” — to have made the journey and survived.
Pilot Blake Henderson was “chasing a JN-4 Jenny biplane … [when] his phone was sucked out of the craft on accident and dropped around 1,000 feet into a very nice [family’s] yard.”
We see the entirety of that drop, though the spins encountered on the way to the ground look for the most part like electronic noise (actually we recommend watching with the sound off because there’s lots of noise-noise too). What’s incredible, though, is the too-good-for-Hollywood ending, when the phone comes to rest on the ground — pointed toward the sky, so that a big patch of blue sky and fluffy, swiftly advancing clouds are shown. That image is a beautiful one.
Is this real life? Is this just fantasy? Or is it, even worse, a marketing campaign?
There’s plenty of detailed discussion about the plausability factor on the YouTube page’s comments section (“it’s a tiny phone, dropped from 1,000 ft., never reaching terminal velocity of 120 mph, not factoring in bouyancy and drag … hitting the bushes, significantly reducing the fall rate and impact … come on … it’s absolutely plausible …”).
We have to think that if Samsung wanted to capture the public’s attention they might have done so with a newer model of their phone — the S5 is approximately three millennia old in smartphone time.
But maybe more seriously, are we at the point where anything cool and serendipitous seems fabricated?
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