Air France passenger’s lost phone forces plane to return to airport mid-flight

It was a tough call.

An Air France flight from Paris, France to Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, was forced to make a U-turn after a passenger lost their phone, sparking safety concerns.

Flight AF750 had departed the City of Light at around 11:52 a.m. Friday, and had flown out of France and over the English Channel en route to the French-owned Caribbean Isle, One Mile At A Time reported.

Just one hour into the nine-hour journey, a passenger reported losing their phone in the seat, the Independent reported.

Despite extensive search efforts, the crew could not locate the device, whereupon they decided to return home as a “precautionary measure.”

As a result, the Boeing 777-300 ferried 375 passengers and 12 cabin crew back to Paris, landing at 3:25 p.m. — just two hours and 16 minutes after takeoff.

Upon arrival, maintenance teams were dispatched to find the missing smartphone, eventually recovering it. The flight then departed for Guadeloupe 20 minutes later.

A missing phone might sound innocuous, but phones contain lithium-ion batteries, which can pose a fire hazard if overheated or confined. One Mile At A Time’s Ben Shlappig observed that “if a phone gets lost somewhere (whether it’s a seat or some other contraption), and then becomes damaged” it could potentially cause a fire.

This could be doubly dangerous given that the smoking phone would be hidden from view.

There have been myriad instances of these inadvertent explosives bursting into flame in-flight — including a recent incident where a power bank started smoking in the overhead aboard a Batik Airlines flight from Malaysia to Thailand.

Meanwhile, multiple airlines across Asia have started banning people from using power banks or storing them in luggage on board for this reason.

Losing one’s device aboard is more common than one might think, with One Mile At A Time commenters sharing their own tales of misplaced devices.

“I lost my phone in business class on an Emirates 777 BKK-SYD and the crew had my seat ripped apart in about 5 seconds with a jug of water on hand in case it caught fire,” recounted one flyer. “I think they just dump them in the jug if necessary. That AF diversion would have easily been [$]100-200K. Wild.”

Meanwhile, one flight attendant recounted, “Just to underscore how frequent this is, I recently had a passenger lose her phone in the seat 3 times in 1 hour. Needless to say, she was told to put her phone inside her suitcase until landing.”

Shlappig said that the state of travel and tech today is, unfortunately, a perfect storm for an inflight blaze.

“You have people traveling with a lot more electronics, and at the same time, you have (premium) seats that are becoming increasingly complex, with more motorized functions,” he wrote. “This increases the risk of passengers losing electronics, and even more, it increases the risk of a fire.”