One of the iPhone’s neat tricks is its ability to share content with nearby iOS and macOS devices. This is easily the simplest way to share pictures with friends and family, as long as everyone’s on a compatible device. And it turns out, that if you’re a captain flying your jumbo jet at 35,000 feet, you can AirDrop pics to a captain flying his own massive plane some 1,000 feet above you.
The following video looks like an Apple commercial for AirDrop, but it can’t be, as The Rock doesn’t fly any of these two planes.
As you can see in the following clip, AirDrop sharing somehow works even though the two captains are quite a few hundreds of feet apart. The transfer apparently goes through as you’d expect from AirDrop, in spite of the distance.
How is this trick possible when I sometimes can’t even AirDrop files between my iPhone and Mac without pushing a few extra buttons first?
Apple says on its official AirDrop help pages that users have to be “nearby,” and that they have to be in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi range to make it all happen.
Now, since this isn’t an Apple commercial launched after the iPhone 8’s announcement, we’re still looking at older iOS devices. They do not support Bluetooth 5.0, which is the latest Bluetooth standard that’s supposed to offer even better coverage and transfer speeds. And yes, the iPhone 8 is expected to have a Bluetooth 5.0 chip inside.
Unless it’s been faked, and the captain is sending the picture to his co-pilot or a flight attendant, then this trick is just amazing. Check out the full video below.
