The Bizarre Laptop Safety Issue That Caused An International United Flight To Turn Around

Flight disruptions and delays seem to be happening more and more frequently these days, but most of the time, once you're in flight, you're on your way. However, planes can get diverted mid-flight. It's got a low likelihood of happening, but it can occur if there are problems with the plane, severe weather, and, as it turns out, if you accidentally drop your laptop into the cargo hold. That's what happened to United Flight 126 leaving from Washington Dulles and headed to Rome Fiumicino earlier this month.

United Airlines told The Independent that a laptop slipped "behind a cabin wall panel and through a small gap leading to the cargo hold." When you go to check in your baggage at the airport, you have to confirm that you don't have any spare lithium-ion batteries in your luggage; they're one of those things that are banned from flights. So, letting an errant battery loose into the hold isn't something that the airline wants to have happen. We're not exactly sure how someone managed to get their laptop behind a wall panel and into the underside of the plane, but that's a different issue.

Lithium-ion batteries pose a small but still concerning risk of overheating and catching on fire. If that happens down in the cargo hold where you can't see what's happening, an overheating battery could escalate into a serious issue very quickly. So, the flight crew determined that the safest course of action was to return to Dulles, find the laptop, and then head back towards Rome.

It sounds like it can be quite the dramatic situation when a battery overheats. "Lithium batteries can go into what's called thermal runaway," Fire Safety Branch Manager Robert Ochs told CNN. "All of a sudden, it'll start to short circuit ... It will get warmer and warmer and warmer until the structure of the battery itself fails. At that point, it can eject molten electrolyte and flames and smoke and toxic gas."

This is why some airlines go so far as to ban the use of power banks even while in flight, as they're lithium-ion batteries. And while not banning them outright, Southwest Airlines, for one, is updating their policy to say that power banks must be visible if they're being used. The potential for fire is also why flight attendants have started to tell people not to reach between seats if they drop their phone; a damaged phone could trigger the thermal runaway situation.

The Washington to Rome flight wasn't the first time that an errant laptop caused a mid-flight diversion. Something similar happened in May 2024 on a flight between Zurich and Chicago with an unscheduled stop in Ireland after a laptop got stuck in a seat.