Walker's job apparently involves leaning out of aircraft – suitably safety harnessed – but one day earlier this month his iPhone fell out of his pocket and tumbled to the ground.
Since the plane was travelling at 150 mph, you could be forgiven for thinking the handset might have – at the very least – a cracked screen.
According to the Geek.com newswire, however, when he returned to the ground, a fellow officer powered up his own smartphone and accessed the 'Find My iPhone' web portal, tracking Walker's handset using GPS.
"That allowed the lost iPhone to be tracked to a nearby forest where everyone expected it to be smashed", says the newswire.
"The only protection Walker's phone had was a Griffin Motif case and a metal back fitted, but that seems to have been enough", adds the newswire, noting that the handset was lying next to a tree on the ground without a scratch on it.
"Whether the trees had somehow broken the fall without harming it, or Apple has a secret iPhone parachute deployment feature it's not telling us about, we will never know", says Geek.com.
Infosecurity notes – with some amusement – that comments to the news story included one from 'Derek' who said that most Android phones have two parachutes, just in case, but cellcos are delaying a rollout of the enhancement at the moment.