Galaxy Death Star
“LEAVE YOUR BAGS. GET off the plane immediately!” shouted the flight
attendant.
Brian Green felt he’d entered a nightmare. The morning of October 5,
2016, Green had taken his seat on Southwest flight 994 at Kentucky’s
Louisville International Airport, where he was preparing for a business trip
in Baltimore. Ten minutes before takeoff, during the safety demonstration,
he powered down his new Samsung Galaxy phone and put it in his pocket.
“I heard some popping that sounded like a ziplock popping open,”
Brian later told a television crew in his southern accent, “and looked
around to see what that was. There was smoke just billowing, pouring out
of my pocket.”
He yanked his smartphone from his pants pocket and threw it on the
carpeted floor.
“I didn’t want it to explode in my hand,” he said. Angry, thick, green-
gray smoke was billowing out of it. The smoke spread several rows in
front of him and behind him before dissipating throughout the rest of the
cabin. The Southwest Airlines crew decided it was time to get everyone
out.
By 9:20 A.M., the flight attendants had evacuated all seventy-five
passengers and crew members. Emergency crews arrived to retrieve the
smoldering device and to check the passengers for injuries. Fortunately, no
one lost “a finger or a hand over it,” as Green put it—he had tossed the
phone away just in time. The smoking piece of metal, plastic, and circuitry
was so hot that it had burned right through the carpet. When airline
mechanics pulled the layer of carpet away to reveal the subfloor
underneath, it was seared and blackened.