Crowded Air France jet forced to return to Paris after passenger loses his smartphone
Lately there have been a higher than normal number of flights forced to turn around and return to the airport that the plane departed from for frightening reasons. Smoke in the cabin and/or cockpit has been one reason why the pilots were forced to make a U-turn. Unruly passengers are another reason with one trying to open the emergency exit to walk off the jet mid-flight.
Just yesterday, a packed Air France flight (AF750) left Paris for a nine-hour flight to Guadeloupe and had to return to Paris after just one hour. Was there an issue with the Boeing 777-300ER that endangered the 375 passengers and 12 crew members onboard? No. According to various media reports and a tweet from content creator Dexerto, a passenger lost his smartphone on the plane.
A missing phone caused an Air France flight to return to Paris after one hour. Image credit-X
A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation indicates that approximately $9,000 in fuel would have been used to fly the hour from Paris, climb to 32,000 feet, and then return to the departure city. One possibility is that there was concern about the phone's lithium-ion batteries that could cause a fire and explosion should the handset get damaged. In 2016, an iPhone 6 caught on fire on an Alaska Air Flight from Washington to Hawaii. The fire was extinguished and the plane landed safely.
A passenger's missing smartphone caused AF750 to make an unscheduled return to Paris one hour into a nine-hour flight. | Image credit-One Mile At a Time
On the other hand, an iPhone got lost on a Qantas flight in 2022 and thanks to the "Find My" app, the husband of the iPhone owner discovered that the device was stuck on the plane for several subsequent flights. After the original flight from Sydney to Auckland, the phone flew back to Sydney, went from Sydney to Honolulu to Sydney, and then traveled from Sydney to Auckland before arriving in Sydney once again before it was returned to its owner.
You might recall that in October 2016, the FAA banned the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 from all flights in the U.S. Problems with the battery used to power the model caused several units to spontaneously explode and Samsung was forced to remove the device from the market.
As for AF750, it would appear that Air France was able to find the missing phone as the flight took off from Paris two hours after it landed back where it started. The arrival time in Guadeloupe was just under four hours past the original ETA.
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