Louisa Hearn

More airlines are cracking down on the use of laptops in the air in the same week that a new incident was reported to have turned an IBM laptop into a "firecracker" at a US airport.

The incident is chronicled on the Engadget website, which picked the story up from a forum post on a site called somethingawful.com written by a person claiming to have seen the fire and photographed its aftermath.

The forum post reports that a man suddenly came running the wrong way up the jetway in the United lounge at Los Angeles International airport, and then dropped his laptop on the floor.

"The thing immediately flares up like a giant firework for about 15 seconds, then catches fire," said the writer of the post under the code name William Shatner.

"... if that thing had fired off while that plane was in the air, who knows what would have happened," he added.

Spotted here