Pretty scary stuff, nice to see most of the pax with their cameras out…
INCIDENT / Air China flight CA139, an Airbus A321 (B-8583), was en route at FL330 from Hanghzou to Seoul when a thermal runaway of a lithium battery occurred, leading to a fire in an overhead bin....
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Probably a good thing to have cameras out!
Nothing a passenger can do to extinguish the fire, but the footage could be invaluable for training purposes, not just on CI, but other airlines as well. Pax behaviour, crew response times, actions taken by crew to extinguish the fire. All valuable.
As for the criticism of the passenger trying to remove their case next to the fire… removing a source of fuel may not have been a bad first reaction.
Other commentators demand to know why pax did not close the overhead bin to ‘starve the fire of oxygen’.
Overhead bins aren’t airtight. And had the plastic or lock melted, permanently closing the bin, the fire could have been much harder to access and put out, and retrieving the battery much more difficult.
Had this become even more serious, leading to the crash of the aircraft, footage recorded and transmitted in flight would have also been valuable.
The more people that see this the better… educating the public on the dangers of batteries in flight is a good thing.
The question is, why wouldn’t someone film this?
