Three passengers were reportedly injured during an evacuation of an American Airlines jet at San Francisco International Airport on Friday afternoon after the cabin began to fill with smoke as passengers were still boarding the airplane.
At least one emergency slide was deployed to evacuate passengers onto the tarmac as the airport fire service rushed to the nine-and-a-half-year-old Airbus A321 aircraft.
The airplane had arrived at SFO not long before following a five-hour flight from Miami, and it was preparing for its return flight to Florida as flight AA2045 when the emergency evacuation was initiated.
Mati Cesario, one of the passengers onboard the plane, said in a post on X that another passenger’s electronic device caught fire and started to fill the cabin with smoke.
“It was desperate until someone opened the middle door and we were able to escape as we were all blocked in the hallway,” Cesario said in a followup post. “Some people slightly injured”.
Photos of the evacuation showed that the mid-cabin exit doors were used to evacuate passengers via emergency slides, while some passengers were able to get off the plane via the jetbridge, which was still attached to the aircraft at the time of the incident.
It would also appear that the rear left-hand cabin door was opened in an attempt to evacuate passengers, but the slide did not deploy – this was probably because the slide wasn’t armed because the aeroplane was still at the gate.
In a statement, a spokesperson for American Airlines confirmed that a passenger’s laptop had started to smoke during boarding.
“During boarding of American Airlines flight 2045 with service from San Francisco (SFO) to Miami (MIA), smoke was reported from inside a customer’s bag,” the statement explained.
“The bag was quickly removed by our crew members and all customers exited the aircraft. We thank our crew members for their professionalism and apologize to our customers for the inconvenience.”
Damaged electronic devices like mobile phones and laptops have become a real safety issue for airlines in recent years, with an increasing number of evacuations prompted by overheating devices.
One of the reasons that modern electronic devices cause such a safety concern is because they are powered by lithium batteries that can suffer a so-called ‘thermal runaway’ event if they are damaged.
Thermal runaway events cause a lot of heat and smoke and can be very difficult to put out, although many airlines have special fire containment bags for exactly this kind of scenario.
In December 2022, a JetBlue plane that had just landed at New York JFK was partially evacuated into the tarmac after a passenger’s laptop started to overheat, and in August 2021, an Alaska Airlines plane was evacuated onto the runway at Seattle Tacoma after a passenger’s mobile phone began to overheat.
American Airlines has been contacted for comment.
Look at all the luggage that managed to evacuate safely. What a relief.