Laptop fire caused American Airlines jet to be evacuated
No laptop maker has yet claimed responsibility.
A laptop fire on a passenger jet precipitated a dramatic emergency evacuation on Friday. American Airlines Flight 2045 was getting ready to fly from San Franciso to Miami when the cabin started to fill with smoke - it was coming from the rear of the plane, from a laptop bag. As the airplane was still on the tarmac, there were only three minor injuries in the rush to disembark using the airbridge and slides. However, one passenger needed to be taken for further treatment.
“Do not take your bags!” This is tense. Fire breaks out on American Airlines plane in San Francisco. Emergency evacuation slowed down by selfish passengers insisting on taking their bags out of the overhead bins. pic.twitter.com/O9T012kJWTJuly 13, 2024
A statement from American Airlines, as reported by CBS News, says "the bag was quickly removed by our crew members and all customers exited the aircraft." The airline also apologized for the inconvenience caused to its customers and thanked staff for their professional handling of the situation. You can see in the Twitter/X video embedded above that the situation was highly charged and quite terrifying for some passengers.
We looked at several reports about the American Airlines laptop fire but didn’t find any sources that could provide further details about the laptop model involved or any indication of why it might spontaneously combust.
Current airline regulations state that laptops should be only carried in hand luggage and contain batteries rated at 100Wh or lower. Thus, we see workstation replacement-style laptops often boast of having a 99 Wh battery. However, up to two extra battery packs of up to 160Wh are permissible with airline approval.
These battery-limiting regulations started to roll out worldwide in the late noughties, as we began to see dangers in the thirst for high-capacity high power density batteries. Lithium-based batteries, as used by devices like smartphones, tablets, portable game consoles, and laptops have been behind many reports of tech going bad over the last couple of decades.
Dangerous devices are often recalled after a brief period of availability, but in the interim may have caused serious fires or even explosions. Have a quick search through the Tom’s Hardware archives for plenty of examples. Probably the most notorious 'accidentally incendiary' electronic device is a smartphone, though, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7.
Circling back to the American Airlines jet evacuation story, one of the passengers pondered over the probable cause of the fire on the jet. "Sometimes, they do get hot," if you close a device but they don't sleep properly or shut down, the passenger mused, reports CBS.
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I’ve experienced a severe overheating issue with a Dell Latitude that didn't sleep or shut down when the lid was closed - but I caught it before there was much in the way of smoke (or fire) thanks to a strong burning plastic smell. The battery in that device could be quickly detached using a sliding mechanism, but it couldn't be used again as the keyboard keys had melted.
Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
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Unolocogringo More stupid arrogant Americans.Reply
We have become a society of "ME" I sadly admit.
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USAFRet Reply
Soooo....no one else on the planet carries battery powered devices?Unolocogringo said:More stupid arrogant Americans.
We have become a society of "ME" I sadly admit.
:(
Interesting. -
bit_user First, isn't there some guideline for reducing the risk, like charging only to 85% or something like that?Reply
Second, the article seems to talk about a wholly different issue:
The article said:"I’ve experienced a severe overheating issue with a Dell Latitude that didn't sleep or shut down when the lid was closed - but I caught it before there was much in the way of smoke (or fire) thanks to a strong burning plastic smell. The battery in that device could be quickly detached using a sliding mechanism, but it couldn't be used again as the keyboard keys had melted."
Was that really the battery? I've had a laptop fan fail. The i5-1250P CPU was throttling back, all the way to 400 MHz on a single core, because it was also riding a temperature of 100 C. This involved a laptop sitting in the open, in normal room temperature (68 - 72 F) office. I'm pretty sure it could not throttle back any further. If it'd been confined to a zipped bag, for enough time, just the CPU heat alone could probably have done such damage. -
pixelpusher220 Reply
The 'ME' mantra here is people literally stopping during an *evacuation* to open the bins and take bags.Unolocogringo said:More stupid arrogant Americans.
We have become a society of "ME" I sadly admit.
:( -
mevinyavin I'm way too much of a control freak for using sleep at all, for this reason. I simply shut down my computer entirely (either off or hibernate if in middle of something). Sleep has too much potential for the computer turning on by itself, and I can't handle that possibility.Reply
As for hibernate "ruining" the SSD - that's the way I want to use my SSD, thank you very much, and when it breaks, I'll happily pay to replace it. I keep my data in three places, after all. -
bit_user Reply
I don't believe hibernate would ruin a SSD, unless it was happening dozens of times per day. Even then, you'd probably need to have a lot of RAM, with most of it in use, and a relatively small SSD. Otherwise, I just don't see it adding up to a significant number of DWPD.mevinyavin said:As for hibernate "ruining" the SSD - that's the way I want to use my SSD, thank you very much, and when it breaks, I'll happily pay to replace it. I keep my data in three places, after all. -
KyaraM I would just turn off the device when not in use. Basically zero risk of anything happening, and I frankly don't get why you would keep it turned on when you are not using it either. I had it once as a teen that a laptop started overheating because of exactly that, me not shutting it off properly before storing it away. Thankfully I caught it before anything happened, but man did that teach me a lesson for live.Reply -
bit_user Replymevinyavin said:I simply shut down my computer entirely (either off or hibernate if in middle of something). Sleep has too much potential for the computer turning on by itself, and I can't handle that possibility.
@abufrejoval seemed to be describing exactly this scenario, yet Windows would schedule BIOS to power up at routine intervals to perform maintenance tasks.KyaraM said:I would just turn off the device when not in use. Basically zero risk of anything happening, -
nameless0ne We have Microsoft to thank for no one trusting the "Sleep" function. Win 10 would fail to go into sleep and worse yet - would hang with the CPU at max. At this state it wouldn't even thermal throttle. This heat alone in a bag could ignite or cause the battery to vent. And then they introduced modern sleep that just eats your battery until it is empty. Saw this on multiple devices from different manufacturers.Reply
And people like the convenience of just closing the lid and continuing to work after they open it. In a perfect world no one would shut down/restart their PCs unless they need it for updates.