Regional Express has announced an incident in which an iPhone self combusted on a plane traveling from Lismore to Sydney, reports AppAdvice.
Regional Express (Rex) flight ZL319 operating from Lismore to Sydney today had an occurrence after landing, when a passenger's mobile phone started emitting a significant amount of dense smoke, accompanied by a red glow.
In accordance with company standard safety procedures, the Flight Attendant carried out recovery actions immediately and the red glow was extinguished successfully. All passengers and crew on board were unharmed.
The matter has been reported to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) as well as the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) for investigation and directions. The mobile phone in question appears to be an Apple iPhone (see picture below) and has been handed over to ATSB for analysis.
It appears that an overheating battery was at fault for the incident.
My iPhone 4 only over heats when plugged into my car dock. It gets scary hot sometimes. I'm thinking the current regulation is not as good when in a vehicle in general. Maybe something to do with a small factor of DC to AC back to DC??
The Australia/New Zealand iPhone back cover is unique to that market, the pictured iPhone has the USA FCC regulatory stamp, Australia's is a triangle with a check mark in it. If you have the FCC symbol then you likely have a grey market iPhone.
interesting, all model "X" (Oz/NZ) iPhones we have seen had the local Oz/NZ regulatory mark on the back instead of the USA/EU mark, very strange that would change as the USA/EU mark has nothing to do with Oz/NZ unless they have since adopted the USA/EU regulations in the past few months. We are not aware of that. But then again we are not on the ground in Oz like you are ;-) Can you confirm your iPhone is in fact model "X" (see Settings>General>About on your device) and has the original back cover as sold from the factory new?
my iphone 4s overheated too last weekend. my wife was playing a game on my phone while we were on a train. she must have been playing for around 15 minutes when the phone started to get really hot. i quickly turned the phone off to let it cool.
it appears like sabotage. Easy, in Australia Samsung and Apple are in an all-out war. Samsung can buy an iPhone, install a defaulted battery pack and let it burn and give bad publicity to Apple.