Girl’s iPhone Bursts Into Flames Mid-Flight

Megalith

Megalith

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Representatives from Apple and the FAA did not return calls for comment on the story.

"When it started I thought we were going down, and I was like, 'oh my god, there's a fire on the plane,'" Crail said. The flight from Bellingham was carrying 163 passengers high above the Pacific Ocean when the fire started. "All of the sudden there was like 8-inch flames coming out of my phone," Crail said from Honolulu. "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."
 
Be curious if these are "non" Apple batteries. I know people that get excited and buy cheap batteries from Amazon (Android, iPhone, laptops, etc). You get what you pay for.
Same with cables.
(Not saying it's not an Apple battery. The article didn't get specific.)
 
steakman1971 said:
Be curious if these are "non" Apple batteries. I know people that get excited and buy cheap batteries from Amazon (Android, iPhone, laptops, etc). You get what you pay for.
Same with cables.
(Not saying it's not an Apple battery. The article didn't get specific.)
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Considering the iPhones don't have removable batteries, how would that be the case? Unless she had taken it to a repair shop and received some random battery replacement...

Curious.
 
I see the USB cable... maybe she was charging it? Story makes for many unanswered questions
 
Burticus said:
Considering the iPhones don't have removable batteries, how would that be the case? Unless she had taken it to a repair shop and received some random battery replacement...

Curious.
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down here there are places in the mall that will replace batteries in non-user replaceable devices... they use cheap non-oem chinese batteries
 
Was she watching a Michael Bay film? :D I thought Apple was working on a way to brick any iOS device that had a non OEM battery but this seems extreme.
 
Over the past couple of years, Alaska Airlines has installed power and USB sockets for seats in nearly all of their airplanes. Perhaps one malfunctioned?

There's too many unanswered questions to point fingers of blame yet.
 
There are never too many unanswered questions to point fingers!
 
I like how:
"Nance said Thursday's fire is another reason to always keep your phone on airplane mode, because searching for a signal the whole time can wear out your battery."

Hah, blaming it because the phone was supposedly not in airplane mode?

If that were the case, then that means there are serious issues with the iPhone 6.

Dude sounds like he has no clue what he is talking about.
 
Burticus said:
Considering the iPhones don't have removable batteries, how would that be the case? Unless she had taken it to a repair shop and received some random battery replacement...
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Most likely the battery had been replaced by a cheap 3rd party battery.

However, I'll wait for the investigation, as even OEM batteries go bad.

In the past couple months, I noticed my kids 3ds had a bulge in the bottom of the case. It was the battery.
This was an original Nintendo battery, so I didn't expect this type of failure.
I also had an old Blackberry phone sitting on a shelf in my office.
I haven't used it for over 3 years, but something didn't look right. It also had a budging original battery, and it hadn't been used for years.
Once Li-On batteries start to budge they become a fire hazard, and most have warnings not to charge them if this happens.

My kid didn't think to tell me the 3ds wasn't sitting flat or it wasn't lasting long on a charge any more.
Because of this it was spending a lot more time plugged in. If this battery had burst into flames, it would likely have burned down my house.

Starting to get concerned about these Li-on batteries.
 
Regardless if it was a cheap after market battery or not, this sort of situation is precisely why electronic devices should not be built to prevent the user from being able to easily remove the battery. The way they are installed into devices like the iPhone makes it difficult (if not impossible) to see warning signs like bloat before the battery would catastrophically fail.
 
Where I last worked, we had a bunch of Motion tablets with an OEM extended run battery pack that clipped to the back of the unit. Most of them became rather pillow shaped after a year or so. At least it was easy to see which ones were going bad. No fires but I am sure some were on flights.
 
I don't know ... It sounds like a hoverboard disguised as an iPhone. Wait! Decipticons!
 
We had a pre-retina, unibody MBP we had to swap the original, factory battery on because it was bulging. We didn't really realize what was going on with it until the trackpad stopped clicking and I disassembled it to attempt repair.

Turns out in the 6 months it was basically sitting unused, the battery had grown substantially. All this to say Apple (like any manufacturer) is not infallible. Stuff happens, you just have to hope you either catch it in time or the failure isn't too catastrophic.
 
BigJayDogg3 said:
We had a pre-retina, unibody MBP we had to swap the original, factory battery on because it was bulging. We didn't really realize what was going on with it until the trackpad stopped clicking and I disassembled it to attempt repair.

Turns out in the 6 months it was basically sitting unused, the battery had grown substantially. All this to say Apple (like any manufacturer) is not infallible. Stuff happens, you just have to hope you either catch it in time or the failure isn't too catastrophic.
Click to expand...

You're spot on. I've had a lot of issues with Lithium based batteries in multiple form factors and situations. Some of them failed as you described (laptops, phones), but I've also seen people drop 18650 batteries resulting in the battery catching on fire due to cell damage, even with legit known good battery brands. With as roughly as some freight and packages get handled, I'm surprised the fire issue isn't a more frequent problem.
 
BigJayDogg3 said:
Stuff happens, you just have to hope you either catch it in time or the failure isn't too catastrophic.
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Exactly.

I feel users should be intimately familiar with the theory and operation of any product they own. Warning signs of failure, damage, maintenance, etc. Unfortunately, more and more sophisticated devices like smartphones/tablets are being designed to not be serviced and the entry level (Especially for Apple devices. Zing!) is so much lower now than 15 years ago, consumers just don't know the basics of how to watch out for defective equipment/components. Or in some cases literally cannot because of how it's designed.

I'm glad this was not a lot more worse than it could have been.
 
You hear a lot of stories like this about cheap knockoff replacement batteries, but iPhone 6 is pretty recent so it's more likely to be the OEM one. Even then it does happen sometimes, I remember Lenovo had to recall an entire batch of Thinkpads with bad batteries a few years ago.
 
Quix said:
You hear a lot of stories like this about cheap knockoff replacement batteries, but iPhone 6 is pretty recent so it's more likely to be the OEM one. Even then it does happen sometimes, I remember Lenovo had to recall an entire batch of Thinkpads with bad batteries a few years ago.
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Read the article and yeah iPhone 6 is pretty new, so likely it's a original battery. I'm glad to hear the airline crew are trained to be aware of battery fires, what to do, and not point the blame on passengers. Sounds like this is that 0.1% case of OEM battery failure, that just happened to be on a plane.
 
Tweak42 said:
Read the article and yeah iPhone 6 is pretty new, so likely it's a original battery. I'm glad to hear the airline crew are trained to be aware of battery fires, what to do, and not point the blame on passengers. Sounds like this is that 0.1% case of OEM battery failure, that just happened to be on a plane.
Click to expand...
It's even less likely than a 0.1% chance. There are millions of smartphones out there and we almost never hear of them spontaneously catching fire. It's got to be more like a .00001% chance.
 
cyclone3d said:
I like how:
"Nance said Thursday's fire is another reason to always keep your phone on airplane mode, because searching for a signal the whole time can wear out your battery..
Click to expand...
That's not airplane mode, it's don't burst into flames mode.
 
Gman1979 said:
You're spot on. I've had a lot of issues with Lithium based batteries in multiple form factors and situations. Some of them failed as you described (laptops, phones), but I've also seen people drop 18650 batteries resulting in the battery catching on fire due to cell damage, even with legit known good battery brands. With as roughly as some freight and packages get handled, I'm surprised the fire issue isn't a more frequent problem.
Click to expand...
SFBUM7.JPG



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That was the result of a 18650 exploding. Lion batteries can be dangerous as hell ifyou arent careful.
 
isn't it obvious that she decided not to accept the mission?.... so the device self destructed.....

DocSavage said:
It's even less likely than a 0.1% chance. There are millions of smartphones out there and we almost never hear of them spontaneously catching fire. It's got to be more like a .00001% chance.
Click to expand...

there are BILLIONS of phones in use overall....
 
Apple sold 230,000,000 iPhones in 2015. We've seen, what, 2 or 3 news stories of iPhones bursting into flames? 1 in 100 million odds is good enough. You're probably more likely to be bit by a marmoset while golfing.
 
/usr/sbin said:
That was the result of a 18650 exploding. Lion batteries can be dangerous as hell ifyou arent careful.
Click to expand...

Those batteries do fail in a catastrophic way. I tend to charge mine at .25A and after they are charged I let them sit for a bit before I start using them. Same when I drained a battery. Just wait a bit and then plop it in the charger. I tend to think of them like plasma grenades from the Halo series.

evilsofa said:
Apple sold 230,000,000 iPhones in 2015. We've seen, what, 2 or 3 news stories of iPhones bursting into flames? 1 in 100 million odds is good enough. You're probably more likely to be bit by a marmoset while golfing.
Click to expand...

The odds are low indeed considering the amount of product that is sold. Having it happen on a plane mid flight is probably one of the worst times for it to happen.
 
dangerouseddy said:
I thought iPhone batteries were not user replaceable, at least not easily.
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Yes, but people also buy cheap knockoff or universal chargers for their phones. But only when they don't "fix" it themselves. Some of the stuff I've seen on techsupportgore with phone chargers is downright frightening.
 
I've heard that a lot of countries have actually banned or restricted the shipping of Li-On batteries without marking the package as hazardous. So people in those places have to buy a device sans battery and have one installed. I haven't experienced this myself, but I remember wondering what was so dangerous about Lithium batteries that they would regulate them so harshly. Apparently, this would be the reason.

A replacement for that technology can't come soon enough. It's not only insufficient for rising power needs, it's dangerous. We've needed an upgrade in battery tech for ages, but it hasn't been forthcoming.
 
TechLarry said:
Riiiiight.
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even gigabyte, msi, or asus' half-decent mobos (just one example out of many...) dont use a bunch of cheap chinese parts, & theyre chinese companies. its documented fact apple cuts every possible corner to keep manufacturing costs down. they use decent ICs tho...cos they have to.
 
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