If you drop your phone down your seat while on a flight, you have to inform a flight attendant rather than trying to retrieve it yourself because it can actually pose a huge threat. We all carry our smartphones with us on a plane journey, and they can be a source of entertainment for us on both long and short trips. Many people also opt for a digital boarding pass on their phone rather than printing one out. 

But phones can actually pose quite a threat on a flights. When they are dropped down the side of a seat by a passenger, it should not be retrieved by anyone other than a flight attendant for a major safety reason. Following incidents such as that on a Qantas flight to Melbourne, Australia, when one passenger dropped his phone and tried to retrieve it himself, the rule came into effect to prevent flyers from being put in serious danger. During this flight in 2018, the man dropped his phone, and in an attempt to retrieve it, he ended up crushing it. 

While this was an annoyance for the man who now had a damaged phone, it proved to be a dangerous thing to do and put his fellow passengers in danger while in the sky. 

The phone started smoking with a flight attendant thankfully coming to the rescue to get the situation under control. This happened because the man's seat moved as he tried to retrieve the phone which resulted in it being crushed.

Phones have powerful lithium batteries which can catch fire or even explode when they are crushed. Passengers must alert cabin crew if they drop their phone and can't get to it to avoid incidents like this. 

A number of incidents involving phone batteries catching fire on flights have been reported over the last few years. In November 2024, a Southwest Airlines plane which was being boarded in Denver International Airport, Colorado, was evacuated because a person's phone caught on fire. 

As a result, one of the plane's seats also caught on fire and the passenger's hand was injured. One passenger who had already boarded the flight told CBS News that smoke "filled the back of the cabin" while another described the "panicking" during the incident.