Apple Inc. records one more incident of its iPhone going down in flames, this time in mid-air. Anna Crail was on her way to Hawaii when her iPhone 6 started to give off smoke. Crail, who was on an Alaska Air flight, initially thought her plane was going to crash.
“There’s a fire on the plane”
Crail, who was flying from Bellingham, Wash. to Hawaii with Alaska Air on Thursday, suddenly noticed that flames were emitting from somewhere near her.
In an interview with KOMO News, she said, “When it started I thought we were going down, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a fire on the plane.'”
The flight was 1 hour and 30 minutes from Honolulu over the Pacific Ocean. Flames continued to come out of her iPhone.
“All of the sudden there was like 8-inch flames coming out of my phone. 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,” Crail told KOMO News.
On a plane, it is not every day that a passenger sees flames. You may see snakes or insects, but flames? Certainly not. The incident is being investigated by the Federal Aviation Administration. The Boeing 737 landed safely with no damage to people or plane, said a spokesman. Of course the iPhone is charred.
Not the first incident for Apple’s iPhone
This is not the first incident of a flaming iPhone. A passenger on an Australian flight five years ago noticed that his iPhone started to glow and emit smoke. Just last year, an eighth grader in Maine heard a pop, and her back pocket where her iPhone rested began to smoke.
And it’s not only the iPhone that catches fire. A Hong Kong man blamed his Samsung Galaxy S4 for burning down his home two years ago. Such incidents are rare, but in Crail’s case, the fire was put out promptly by the airplane crew. Most of the time overheating batteries and unauthorized chargers are blamed when a phone blows up.
As of now, there have been no comments from Apple about the event. Experts say such an incident gives us another reason to put the phone on airplane mode because searching for a signal can wear out the battery.
