'I had a skydive at 14,000ft, forgot one important thing and the unbelievable happened'
A skydiver whose phone flew out of his pocket at 14,000ft was stunned when he later found the device in a forest - without a scratch on it.
Casey Flay, an experienced wingsuiter and skydiver, jumped from the plane like he had so many times before but completely forgot to zip the front pocket with his phone in. A video of his skydive in Honiton, Devon, shows the 37-year-old man preparing to leap with his iPhone 13 Pro Max peeking out of his overalls.
As he takes his leap, the phone flies out of his pocket and plummets towards the Earth. Following his dive, engineer Casey - oblivious to the fact his phone had fallen alongside him - asked others in the plane if he had left it up there.
But he was shocked when he used the Find My iPhone app to track his phone down to a forest four miles away from where he'd landed. Even more surprising, however, was the fact that the 14,000ft (2.65 mile) drop appeared hardly to have left a mark on his device.
READ MORE: Mum of skydiver who died after 10,000ft jump shared heartbreaking post 9 months ago
Casey, from Winchester, Hampshire, said: "I brought my phone in my wingsuit just in case the others couldn't find me when I landed. I left my pocket open and from my helmet camera you can see it sticking out.
"It just flies off when I jump - gone. I didn't even know it was gone; I thought I'd left it on the plane. Nobody could see it on the plane, so I used Find My iPhone and saw it was in a forest.
"I could see it was static, so it wasn't on the plane. I logged in, saw it sitting there, put the coordinates in and drove to a farmhouse about four miles away. The phone was about a 30-minute walk from there. There was not a scratch on it. It was as if it had fallen out of my pocket right there and then. It's unbelievable. It just doesn't happen."
Casey - who has completed more than 500 skydives - added that the devices fall to Earth may even have improved the performance of his phone, as one of the side buttons now functions better than before.
"A couple of years ago I was in a restaurant and spilled something on the phone. No matter how much I cleaned it out, the side button was still stuck. But now, after falling from 14,000 to the ground, it's working fine," he said.
The Find My iPhone app was initially released by Apple on its devices in 2019. The app has had various updates since then. It enables users to track the location of tech.
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