One passenger received medical treatment after a passenger's laptop caught fire aboard American Airlines Flight 2398 as it approached Dallas Fort Worth International Airport on Friday, in an incident the pilot described to air traffic control as a "cabin fire in the back of the airplane."
Audio obtained by CBS News captured the pilot reporting that four to five passengers had been burned by the laptop before flight attendants contained it using a thermal containment bag, moving it to the middle of the aircraft. The flight, which had 133 people aboard and originated in Atlanta, landed safely at around 6:55pm local time, with emergency personnel meeting the aircraft on arrival as standard procedure.
American Airlines said the flight landed safely "after reports of smoke from a customer's device during landing," and thanked its crew for their swift response. The FAA is investigating.
This is not the first time a laptop has caught fire on an American Airlines flight this year. In an earlier incident, a laptop ignited inside a passenger's carry-on bag during boarding of American Airlines Flight 2045 from San Francisco to Miami, prompting a full evacuation via emergency slides and the jetbridge, with three minor injuries reported.
The FAA has recorded 58 verified lithium battery air incidents involving smoke, fire or extreme heat so far this year, with laptop batteries accounting for the highest number of any device category over the past two decades, at 84 cases.
The pattern is not confined to laptops or to US carriers. A UK-bound EasyJet flight from Egypt was diverted to Rome in May after a power bank was found charging inside a passenger's checked luggage, delaying the journey by a full day. The UK's Civil Aviation Authority has said power banks are causing a growing number of serious in-flight issues worldwide and has urged greater passenger awareness of the risks.
Aviation insurers have started explicitly reframing lithium battery incidents as a systemic underwriting concern rather than a low-frequency edge case.
A WTW analysis reported by Insurance Business found that the insured peril can originate from a consumer power bank, an incorrectly declared battery consignment, or even a compliant freight pallet of cells, and pointed to a 2024 industry survey finding the average US traveller carries four battery-powered devices per flight, a volume that becomes systemic exposure once spread across hundreds of passengers on a single aircraft.
That exposure is landing on an aviation insurance market already under financial pressure. Gallagher Specialty's Plane Talking research found that attritional losses have eroded airline premium bases after several consecutive loss-making years, pushing underwriters toward rate increases heading into 2026.
Regulators have moved in parallel -- the International Civil Aviation Organization introduced global specifications in March 2026 limiting passengers to two power banks each and banning in-flight recharging, on top of airline-specific restrictions on device capacity, storage and use during certain flight phases.
For aviation insurers and the brokers placing this business, WTW's analysis suggests the practical underwriting question is shifting from whether an airline has had a battery incident to whether it can demonstrate credible risk controls: crew training on two-step fire suppression procedures, thermal containment equipment actually carried and used correctly, clear passenger communication policies, and cargo screening protocols for declared and undeclared battery shipments.
An incident like Friday's, contained successfully with a thermal containment bag and resulting in only minor injuries, is arguably the outcome those controls are designed to produce, which makes it a useful data point for insurers assessing whether an airline's procedures actually work under real conditions rather than only in training.
What makes this pattern significant for the insurance market is less any single incident and more the frequency curve behind it: 58 verified incidents this year alone, a second American Airlines laptop fire within months, and a separate high-profile diversion tied to an undeclared power bank all point toward a risk that is becoming a routine feature of commercial aviation rather than a rare anomaly.
For an aviation insurance market already absorbing rate pressure from a run of loss-making years, a peril that is rising in frequency even as individual incidents remain largely non-fatal is exactly the kind of exposure that tends to show up first in underwriting scrutiny and risk control requirements, well before it shows up as a headline catastrophic loss.
