Passenger’s lost laptop forces United Arlines to divert flight

A United Airlines flight carrying more than 200 people from Northern Virginia to Rome turned around near the US coast after a passenger dropped their...

A United Airlines flight carrying more than 200 people from Northern Virginia to Rome turned around near the US coast after a passenger dropped their laptop and could not retrieve it.

The airline said in a statement that the computer "had fallen behind a cabin wall panel and through a small gap leading to the cargo hold,” prompting the pilots to divert the October 15 flight back to Washington Dulles International Airport as a precaution.

In a conversation with air traffic controllers in Boston, one of the pilots on Flight 126 described the incident as a "minor situation” with the laptop, which was turned on when it fell into the cargo area. The plane was southeast of Boston when it turned back.

"We don’t know the status of it, we can’t access it, we can’t see it,” he said in a recording saved by the You can see ATC aviation channel on YouTube. "So our decision is to return to Dulles and find this laptop before we can continue over the ocean.”

The pilot said he was not declaring an emergency and did not need special services at the airport. He said he was making the call out of an "abundance of caution” because the lithium battery would be in an area of the Boeing 767 that wasn’t near a fire suppression system.