BATTERY LIFE

United Flight Forced to Turn Back After Business Class Passenger Drops Laptop

The flight was two hours into a flight across the Atlantic before the dramatic U-turn.

A United Airlines flight was forced to make a transatlantic U-turn on Wednesday after a passenger dropped a laptop down the side of a seat, triggering a serious safety protocol. Flight 925 was over the Atlantic, two hours into an eight-hour journey to Washington, D.C., from London when the pilot suddenly swung the 25-year-old Boeing 767 around and diverted to Dublin. According to crew members, a passenger’s laptop had become wedged between a business-class seat and the side wall and could not be retrieved, posing a fire hazard. The primary risk was posed by the device’s lithium battery, which can overheat and enter a state of “thermal runaway,” causing a rapid temperature increase in a short space of time. As the laptop was inaccessible, the crew might not know if the device was on fire until it was too late. “We don’t know the status of it, we can’t access it, we can’t see it,” pilots told air traffic control of the laptop, which had slipped into the cargo hold. “So our decision is to... find this laptop before we can continue over the ocean.” After landing in Dublin, the plane remained on the ground for nearly three hours for inspection. Passengers finally arrived in Washington Dulles around 1:14 a.m., approximately five hours behind schedule. The incident comes less than a month after a passenger aboard another United Boeing 767 dropped a laptop in a similar way, forcing a diversion.