Drama Onboard Hawaiian Airlines Flight to Tokyo After a Passenger’s Cell Phone Suddenly Bursts Into Flames at 40,000 Feet

A mid-flight drama unfolded on a Hawaiian Airlines flight from Honolulu to Tokyo on Sunday after a passenger’s cell phone suddenly burst into flames as the plane was cruising at 40,000 feet above a remote region of the Pacific Ocean.

According to a spokesperson for the airline, which is now part of the Alaska Airlines Group, the crew onboard Flight 457 became aware that something wasn’t right when passengers started to smell a burning electrical smell in the cabin.

As flight attendants desperately tried to find the source of the smell over fears of an onboard fire, they discovered that a passenger’s cell phone had become lodged and damaged in a seat.

This type of incident is a worst-case scenario for flight attendants as it can be difficult to effectively fight a fire from a lithium-ion battery when it is wedged in a seat mechanism.

Luckily, in this case, the flight attendants were able to retrieve the cell phone from within the seat and put it in a fire containment bag.

The incident was, however, serious enough for the pilots aboard Flight 457 to declare an emergency and request priority landing into Tokyo Haneda. According to Japan’s Ministry of Transport, the Airbus A330, carrying around 140 passengers, landed safely, and no injuries were reported.

The aircraft remained on the ground for around five hours, which is significantly longer than the normal turnaround time, presumably so that engineers could make sure there wasn’t any serious damage caused to the seat.

Lithium-ion battery fires are an increasingly big concern for airlines, as there have been a number of high-profile incidents involving onboard fires in recent months.

Perhaps the most serious of these incidents was a fire that occurred just before the departure of an Air Busan Airbus A321 at Gimhae International Airport in South Korea in January.

In that incident, a portable battery pack in a passenger’s backpack, which was in an overhead bin, caught fire during the boarding process. The fire quickly spread, and the plane was completely gutted. Thankfully, all the passengers and crew escaped the burning wreckage with only minor injuries.

In the wake of this disaster, a growing number of airlines have placed restrictions on portable battery packs, but any device containing a lithium battery, such as cell phones and laptops, has the potential to overheat and burst into flames.

One of the biggest risks is a passenger’s device getting stuck in a seat and then being damaged, causing a so-called ‘thermal runaway’ within the battery that is very difficult to extinguish.

It’s now common practice for flight attendants to implore passengers during the safety demonstration not to adjust their seats if they lose their mobile devices for this exact reason.

Matt’s take – Fire Containment Bags Are a Controversial Way to Deal With Mobile Device Fires

Whenever I write a story about flight attendants using a fireproof bag to deal with a lithium battery, I get inundated with comments about how these aren’t effective.

Obviously, some airlines have a very different take on this subject as they are approved for use by flight attendants in exactly this type of situation but there are more straightforward and perhaps more effective ways to deal with a mobile device fire.

When fighting a fire, flight attendants are taught the ‘Fire Triangle’- essentially, a fire can only continue if it has Heat, Fuel, and Oxygen. If you remove one of these three things, then you extinguish the blaze.

A fire containment bag can remove oxygen, but a far simpler is to drown the device in water, thereby eliminating heat and oxygen from the fire.