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Delta Flight Grounded When Lithium Battery Explodes in Passenger’s Carry-On

The flight from Atlanta to Fort Lauderdale was forced to land in Fort Myers.

A Delta flight headed to Fort Lauderdale was diverted from its final destination due to a battery explosion on board. Delta Flight 1334, which left Atlanta around 8:30 on Monday, had to make an emergency landing in Fort Myers after the lithium-ion battery caught fire in a passenger’s carry-on bag. Flight attendants put out the fire, but the pilots still decided to declare an emergency and land the plane. Spare lithium batteries are permitted on flights but only within carry-on bags, a rule that was instituted in the wake of a deadly cargo plane crash in 2010. That crash was caused by the spontaneous ignition of 81,000 lithium-ion batteries in the plane’s cargo hold. Luckily, no injuries occurred on the grounded Delta flight. However, the flight joins a series of abnormal groundings that have taken place in the past week, from a Texas-bound flight in which a snooping passenger mistook a condolence text for a bomb threat to a real bomb threat on Sunday that took place on a flight to Florida. The FAA said in a statement to The Daily Beast that it is investigating the battery incident.