Plane stupidity: my waking flight-mare

The skies above the Atlantic

As airplane doors and Boeing stock prices continue to fall, I think it’s time to tell the story of my iPhone and how it spent almost a week last October trapped inside the belly of a Boeing 767.

A few hours into a United flight home from London, I was standing up to check on my then-five-month-old daughter, who was sleeping sweetly in the bassinet beside her father, when I felt my iPhone slip between the armrest and the window. It was still plugged into the outlet, so naturally I gave the charging cord a little tug, hoping to rescue the phone without incident. Instead, I felt it disconnect. No big deal, I thought.

I scoured the area around my seat: no phone. Perhaps this was one of those cases the flight attendants warn you about at the beginning of the flight, when they tell you to ask for assistance if you lose your phone? I pressed the button for help.

In the meantime, though, I examined the place where my phone had fallen. Shining my husband’s phone flashlight between my armrest and the window, I peered into a gap in the insulation and saw… mechanical ducts. Ducts, leading down, down, down. My phone was not stuck under my seat, I realized: it was somewhere deep inside the plane.

Phones, of course, are not supposed to be down there. With their lithium-ion batteries, they’re a fire hazard. The flight purser informed the pilots, who then had to alert the ground crew at Newark — because the plane would not be allowed to take off again until the phone was retrieved. It was going to be a long night.

When we landed, we waited on the jet bridge for our gate-checked stroller and, we thought, my phone. The pilots came over and joked with us, assuring us that we’d get the phone back that night because, again, the plane couldn’t resume flying until they’d found it.

Still, we had no desire to wait around indefinitely with a baby in tow, so eventually we headed home, thinking we’d hear from someone at Newark in the morning. The next day, though, with no messages to speak of, I checked Find My iPhone on my computer and discovered that my phone was… at Heathrow.

Had the location not updated since I’d toggled Airplane Mode yesterday? The timestamp was current. Had there been some kind of mix-up about my whereabouts, and they’d deliberately flown the phone back to England? I pondered the possibilities.

But no. It seems they simply gave up trying to find the phone that night, and the plane continued on its usual route. For days, we watched with great amusement and slight unease as Find My iPhone tracked my phone back and forth across the Atlantic. Newark, Heathrow, Newark, Heathrow, Newark, Naples, Newark, Geneva. Could a phone accrue air miles, we wondered?

Four days later, at 5 a.m., we received a phone call from Geneva. My phone had been found and would be flown back to Dulles, where I could pay to have it shipped to me. By this time, of course, I’d already purchased a new phone. (Well, I’d wanted a new one anyway.)

Should we extrapolate from my story some larger lesson about the obsessive DEI-fication of airlines at the expense of basic competence and customers’ health and safety? Probably not. But it’s a good story. Besides, my husband and I remain loyal to United and continue to fly regularly on Boeing planes — yes, even the 737 MAX. We root for both companies’ success. But now every time I hear the opening notes of “Rhapsody in Blue” — the best thing about United is its theme song — I look around me for holes… and clutch my phone a little tighter.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2024 World edition.