Report: iPhone Catches Fire Mid-Flight The Alaska Airlines flight was traveling from Bellingham, Wash., to Hawaii, and was somewhere over the Pacific Ocean when the fire started.
This story originally appeared on PCMag
On the list of things you never want to happen when you're flying on a plane, a fire is probably pretty high up.
But that was the scary scene on a recent Alaska Airlines flight from Bellingham, Wash., to Hawaii, and the airborne blaze was reportedly caused by an Apple iPhone. According to Seattle's KOMO News, the iPhone's owner, Anna Crail, was watching a movie on the handset passing time en route to a spring break trip when "flames started shooting out of her iPhone 6."
"When it started I thought we were going down, and I was like, 'oh my God, there's a fire on the plane,'" Crail told the news outlet.
The flight was carrying 163 passengers, and traveling somewhere above the Pacific Ocean when the fire broke out. There's no word as to what caused the phone to ignite.
Fortunately crew members were able to quickly put out the blaze."All of the sudden there was like 8-inch flames coming out of my phone," Crail reportedly said. "And I flipped it off onto the ground and it got under someone's seat, and the flames were just getting higher and a bunch of people stood up."
While smartphone fires are rare, this is not the first such incident. A Canadian teenager last year suffered third-degree burns after his charging iPhone caught on fire while he was sleeping. In that case, the teen's family believes a third-party charger purchased at a local gas station was to blame.
