United passengers stuck in Ireland after laptop incident detours Chicago flight

One clumsy laptop mistake left 157 passengers without a flight. Photo / Martin Bjork, Unsplash

One clumsy mistake left 157 passengers in Ireland, without a flight.

A United Airlines passenger plane was diverted almost 6000km on Monday following an accident involving a laptop.

UA12 from Zurich to Chicago made an unexpected stop in Ireland, after an emergency request to land at County Clare’s Shannon Airport.

Having departed Switzerland on time and 800km into its journey over the Atlantic, the Boeing 767 made a U-turn for an unspecified technical issue and safely landed.

According to travel website PYOK, the diversion was because a personal computer had got caught in a business-class passenger’s seat.

Engineers at Shannon were reportedly able to address the issue, freeing the laptop. However by this time all pilots and crew had “timed out”, running over their safe operating hours, meaning they could not continue flying.

That meant 157 passengers removed from the plane were unexpectedly stranded in Ireland.

A Boeing 767-300/ER of United Airlines at Zurich Airport.

A statement from the carrier told PYOK the diversion was to “address a potential safety risk caused by a laptop being stuck in an inaccessible location”.

“We’re working quickly to get customers to their final destination.”

While this might appear a lot of fuss over a little laptop, airlines take damaged personal devices very seriously. Objects containing lithium batteries are a potential fire hazard.

Pilots deemed it not safe to continue on to Chicago with the passenger’s laptop wedged in the reclining seat.

Airplane safety briefings now contain warnings for passengers dropping laptops and mobile phones into inaccessible recesses, not to retrieve them without help from crew.

Last year four people were hospitalised after a lithium battery pack overheated and burst into flames on a United Airlines flight from San Diego.