An American Airlines flight from Atlanta to Dallas Fort Worth was forced to make an emergency landing at DFW on Friday evening after a passenger’s laptop overheated and caught fire as the plane was on approach to the carrier’s home hub airport, injuring four to five passengers.
The incident occurred on American Airlines flight AA-2398, which departed Atlanta Hartsfield at around 5:20 pm on August 21. Towards the end of the nearly three-hour flight, however, the pilots contacted air traffic control to report a fire in the cabin.
“We’re hustling down now,” one of the pilots told a controller at DFW shortly after the emergency had been declared. “Cabin fire in the back of the airplane,” the pilot added. “The flight attendants are trying to put it out now.”
Not long after, the pilots told the airport tower that the fire was under control but requested medical assistance to meet the aircraft on arrival because the passenger whose laptop had caught fire had sustained burn injuries, as well as between 3 and 4 other passengers who were seated close by.
Thankfully, the pilots of the Airbus A321 aircraft with 133 people on board landed without further incident and taxied to the gate at Terminal C without further incident, where the airport fire service was standing by to meet the plane.
The incident is just the latest in a string of similar events involving overheating electronic devices that are powered by lithium batteries.
In recent months, more and more airlines have introduced strict new rules about the use and storage of power banks, as these pose the greatest threat, but laptops and mobile phones also pose a major safety threat at 35,000 feet.
Flight attendants at American Airlines have special containment bags that they can put overheating electronics inside to quickly contain any fire or smoke. The bags are not only airtight, starving any fire of oxygen, but also contain a special gel that rapidly cools and smothers a device.
If a fire containment bag isn’t available, then the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) recommends dousing and then submerging the electronic device in water. This might sound counterintuitive when you are dealing with electronics, but it’s one of the fastest ways to put out a lithium battery fire.
Passengers are being encouraged to keep all of their electronic devices, and especially power banks, somewhere easily accessible for the duration of a flight, just in case the device starts showing signs of overheating.
The faster that an overheating device is spotted, the easier it is to contain before it catches fire. Power banks should never be placed in overhead bins, and must never be checked into hold luggage. The situation is slightly more complicated for laptop computers, with airlines generally permitting them to be stored in the overhead bin.
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