A flight from Hangzhou to Seoul was forced to make an emergency landing at Shanghai Pudong Airport on Saturday following a lithium battery’s fire.
The incident occurred aboard an Airbus A321 aircraft, with dramatic images circulating online showing bright flames emerging from an overhead storage compartment and black smoke filling the cabin as crew members and at least one passenger worked to extinguish the fire.
“A lithium battery spontaneously ignited in a passenger’s carry-on luggage stored in the overhead bin on flight CA139,” Air China said in a statement on Chinese social media platform Weibo. The airline confirmed that crew members immediately implemented standard emergency procedures to contain the situation.
The spontaneous ignition of lithium batteries (a phenomenon known as thermal runaway) can occur without warning and rapidly escalate into intense fires that are difficult to extinguish with conventional methods.
The aircraft (registration B-8583), which had departed Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport at 9:47 a.m. local time and was originally scheduled to arrive in Incheon, South Korea, at approximately 1 p.m., was diverted for an unscheduled landing at Shanghai Pudong International Airport “to ensure flight safety.”
Data from tracking website Flightradar24 showed that the flight made a complete turn over the sea roughly equidistant from the eastern Chinese coast and Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, before landing in Shanghai shortly after 11 a.m.
