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A fire broke out in the cabin of a China Southern plane while it was boarding at Guangzhou airport around noon on Sunday. No injuries were reported and the fire was quickly extinguished but the incident caused a three-hour delay, the airline said. The company said it was believed to have been caused by a portable mobile phone charger that had been stowed in an overhead compartment by a passenger, according to a preliminary investigation. The charger was not in use when the fire started. As passengers were boarding flight CZ3539 from Guangzhou to Shanghai Hongqiao airport, smoke and flames began billowing from the overhead locker and the cabin crew evacuated the plane. The crew and firefighters put out the fire on the Boeing 777-300ER wide-body jet airliner with only minor damage to the cabin, the airline said. On its official Weibo account, the airline commended the quick reaction of one of the flight attendants. “Our colleague reacted to the fire in a timely and appropriate way,” the company said when asked why a flight attendant was seen throwing water on the fire in a video rather than using an extinguisher. The owner of the charger was taken away by police for further investigation and the rest of the passengers were placed on another flight.<br/>

Thursday’s Air France strike involving the carrier’s pilots, cabin crew and ground staff has ended and the carrier’s operations are returning back to normal, according to a statement on its website. The one-day strike disrupted the travel schedules of thousands of Air France passengers all over the world and will likely continue to do so for the next day or two, according to Michael Holtz, the owner of SmartFlyer, a global travel consultancy specializing in airlines. “It usually takes an airline 24 to 48 hours to get back on track after a strike,” he said. In the case of Air France, since the carrier anticipated the strike because workers had made clear that they would take action, Holtz said that the it likely held most of its planes in Paris, its home base. “Since the planes are sitting in Charles de Gaulle and Orly airports, outbound flights from Paris should be up and running today or within the next day,” he said. In-bound flights to Paris from long-haul destinations, however, could still be delayed for 48 hours, Holtz said, because the planes need to fly from Paris to reach those destinations in order to operate the routes. “Air France has a flight from Bangkok to Paris,” he said. “The plane needs to reach Bangkok from Paris, which takes more than ten hours, before it can fly the scheduled route.”<br/>