Alaska Airlines Flight Evacuated After Passenger's Samsung Galaxy A21 Catches Fire

The last place you want to be when a phone battery bursts into flames is in the confines of an aircraft, but that's where 128 passengers and six crew members were when a Samsung Galaxy A21 caught fire on Monday.

As MacRumors reports, the smartphone didn't catch fire until Alaska Airlines flight 751 from New Orleans had safely landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The device was extinguished by the flight crew using a battery containment bag, but it was "burned beyond recognition." We only know it's a Samsung Galaxy A21 because the owner volunteered the information.

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Although quickly contained, the cabin had already filled with dense smoke, which resulted in the evacuation slides being deployed to get everyone off the aircraft as quickly as possible. Images and a short video posted by news reporter Kevin Ko on Twitter show just how much smoke there was inside.

The positive to take away from this is that the flight crew were ready to deal with a battery fire and had the appropriate equipment available. If the aircraft had still been flying, then I suspect the oxygen masks would have been deployed to avoid breathing in all that smoke.

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Several years ago, Samsung was forced to pull its Galaxy Note 7 from the market amid reports of explosions. Airlines banned it, and Samsung issued a recall. It later blamed bad batteries. Thus far, the Galaxy A21 incident does not appear to be widespread, and it's unclear if the phone itself was defective or had been damaged, or whether a third-party accessory is to blame.

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