In case of an emergency situation

Hello,

Tonight while sitting down, I saw a video on Instagram. A man flying a glider in the middle of a desert suddenly lost control of the glider while filming himself, and crashed to the ground from about 30 meters high. Screaming in pain, he called the emergency hotline from his phone or watch. He also got help from Siri while making the call. After the video, emergency teams arrived at the man’s location and rescued him. After watching this video, I had a few questions. Since I am a software engineer myself, I thought there might be some mechanisms developed to work in such emergency situations. Here are my questions:

• Does my phone automatically share its location with emergency services during such emergencies? If so, how does it do this? Does it send data to a predetermined server over the internet, or does it simply send an SMS? If it’s neither of these methods, then what is it?

• Let’s say my phone or watch is about to run out of battery during such an emergency. Is there a special mechanism in place to ensure the continuity of my communication with emergency services, either software- or hardware-based? For example, suspending or disabling all services on the phone except those supporting the conversation with the emergency unit (to use the remaining battery power for emergency purposes).

• Let’s say the phone’s battery is completely dead. Is there still a mechanism in place for background location sharing?

I hope I never have to use it, but I wanted to ask these questions out of curiosity.

Thank you in advance 🙏🏼