[photopress:NearJPG.jpg,thumb,alignright]There has been a rash of laptops bursting into flames. Pretty much this is always the battery, typically supplied by Sony. Apple, Dell and Sony have all suffered. Now it is the turn of Lenovo. The laptop that caught fire is a ThinkPad but nobody is sure whether it has a Sony battery although it is fairly standard in ThinkPads.
The incident involved a passenger running back up the jetway in Los Angeles as a plane was boarding with a smoking laptop that eventually caught fire.
The report reads:
So we’re waiting for a flight in the United lounge at LAX, the flight next to ours was heading to London and in the middle of final boarding, when suddenly this guy comes running the wrong way up the jetway, pushing other boarding passengers out of the way, he quickly drops his laptop on the floor and the thing immediately flares up like a giant firework for about 15 seconds, then catches fire.
About a hundred other people in the lounge jumped up and began a mix of gawking and general panic, I clearly heard a few fleeing individuals saying something about terrorists. The fire burned for a minute while everybody just stared at it, then another flare up, this one much larger than the first, drove a larger group of gawkers away.
Eventually, the high intensity flaring calmed down and a larger fire kicked in, all the while letting off a thick cloud of white smoke that was slowly filling the terminal. Finally, an employee came over with a fire extinguisher and put it out of its misery.
Source: Something Awful