the essential
Friday, November 15, 108 passengers who were about to take off from Denver airport were very frightened after a phone battery caught fire on the plane. The latter was a few minutes late, which may have avoided a larger disaster.
They were surely angry with Southwest Airlines on Friday November 15 when it announced that its flight to Houston would be slightly delayed due to technical problems. In hindsight, the 108 passengers who were present at Denver International Airport probably thanked this delay.
According to CBS News, a phone battery caught fire inside the plane as the plane was preparing to take off. A wave of panic invaded the hundreds of people present at that moment, as Jennifer told us, interviewed by our colleagues, upon her arrival in Texas. “We saw the smoke as it filled the back of the cabin. Then someone shouted ‘Fire’. Everyone stood up and tried to figure out what was happening.”
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A saving delay
The plane was quickly evacuated and many passengers took a slide to reach the tarmac. In particular, they described a nauseating odor, probably due to the lithium which is present in phone batteries. Passengers also reported that the flight experienced a slight delay in takeoff due to technical problems with the plane.
Obviously, some thought the phone would burn if the company had not slightly postponed the flight time. “That little delay we had at the start really helped us stay on the ground while that was happening (the phone explosion), because we would have been in the air at that point and the phone would have been on fire […] It would have been a disaster,” Seth, one of the passengers, told our colleagues. Fortunately, only one person was injured, the owner of the phone whose hand was burned.
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