Canadian drops iPhone 17 Pro out of a plane… and it still works

I’ve been telling people that 2025’s iPhones are extremely durable. If you still don’t believe me, well, a Canadian artist’s iPhone tumbled out of a plane and survived a roughly 1km fall.

Saskatchewan artist Heather Cline flies with her husband on a small four-seater plane; while he’s piloting, she’s taking photos and videos as references for aerial paintings. On one “great day for flying,” the couple was flying for about 30 minutes at an altitude of 1.1km at speeds of more than 100km/h when an airstream sucked her phone right out of the case.

“I literally was not believing at first, like, that I could have done this. And then he’s just looking at me, and he’s like, ‘I told you not to drop the phone,'” she told CBC.

Cline and her husband travelled 100km east of Regina by rail and road, and eventually, with Find My, tracked her iPhone to a canola field. They found the phone undamaged and still capable of using her cameras.

While CBC doesn’t specify, going off the picture, Cline appears to be using an iPhone 17 Pro. That model features Ceramic Shield 2 with an aluminum frame, as well as an aluminum and glass back — you can tell what’s aluminum and what’s glass by the colour difference.

Though the iPhone 17 Pro doesn’t have a MIL-STD-810G certification for durability, its pretty much all-aluminum body makes the device more malleable. It’s softer against cosmetic dings and scratches, but with its body, it’s able to absorb and dissipate impacts, helping against glass-shattering drops.

My iPhone 17 Pro Max has suffered a lot of cosmetic damage, with dings and scratches, but the glass doesn’t even have a crack, and how could I ever put that beautifully orange phone in a case?

Source: CBC