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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I flew recently and part of the pre-flight announcement now is if you drop a phone or other electronic device between seats, do not try to retrieve it. Call a flight attendant and let them retrieve it.

Apparently, people have dropped their phone then while trying to retrieve it, moved the seat and bent the phone, puncturing the battery.

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I did this a few years ago during taxi before take-off, in a business class seat on a flight to Tokyo (I’m not bragging, it’s literally the only time in my life I’ve ever not flown economy)

I had to move to another seat when I wanted to recline it for sleeping, because the crew (quite rightly) didn’t want my iPhone getting chewed up in the mechanism.

Despite me using my Apple Watch to make the “find me!” ping sound, nobody could find it during the flight, so they had to partly dismantle the seat when we landed. It was all very embarrassing, I had to stand there for 20 minutes watching ground crew take it apart.

I didn’t dare tell anyone that I didn’t turn it onto airplane mode before I dropped it.

While the consequences are less severe, losing them in the seat is one reason I absolutely will not use wireless earphones when flying. I did drop a phone once into a seat but the flight attendant was able to recover it.

> didn’t dare tell anyone that I didn’t turn it onto airplane mode before I dropped it.

I try to remember if only to preserve battery life but I'm willing to bet the vast majority of people don't.

My wife dropped her engagement ring in to a China Airlines seat. Luckily, since it was a flight to Taiwan, we were able to use chopsticks to retrieve the ring from inside the seat!

Don’t feel bad. I once almost superglued my hand to a seat while deplaning.

(And partly superglued my pants to my leg).

Pressure changes have interesting impacts on “sealed” containers!

Imagine walking around for a while with a Lego 2x4 glued to your palm... not that I would know anything about that.

In this case it was not the attempt to retrieve the tablet that caused the accident, it was being unable to reach it to remove it from being jammed in the pedals.

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