An Alaska Airlines flight was evacuated Monday night after a smartphone from the plane caught fire, reports The Seattle Times (via The Verge). A Seattle port spokesman said the burned device was a Samsung Galaxy A21.
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In an email to The Seattle Times, the Port of Seattle spokesman said the phone was “burned without recognition,” but the passenger who owned the device provided details about the model. “We could not confirm this by looking at the remains of the device,” the spokesman said.
The flight crew extinguished the fire with a battery containment bag, but the smoke forced the evacuation slides to be deployed. The smartphone did not catch fire until the flight landed at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. 128 passengers and six crew members were transported by bus to the terminal and there were no serious injuries.
On Twitter, a passenger on the flight said the flaming smartphone was “like a smoking machine.”
I just spoke with a passenger on Alaska Airlines Flight 751, where a fire broke out on the plane after landing at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. An Alaska Airlines official explains that a passenger’s cell phone caught fire @ KIRO7Seattle . We live at SeaTac at 11am. pic.twitter.com/qeNHq4g17Z
– Kevin Ko (@NewsWithKevin) August 24, 2021
There are often isolated incidents that mobile phones caught fire after battery issues, but in this case, the problem could be noticeable as in 2016, Samsung was forced to recover its Galaxy Note 7 due to of the explosion of the batteries.
At the time, multiple Note 7 devices were reported to be exploding or catching fire while charging, and the device was eventually banned from all aircraft and flights in the United States.
There is no evidence that the Galaxy A21 faces a similar widespread problem at this time.